Full Vibing in a Walled Garden

If you don't understand code at all or for whatever reason, you don't want to put hands on code for this project, you can use helpful tools to do everything for you and hide the code and the agent from you. You just prompt and eventually you can get a system.

The flow

Software Engineer
Agent
01
The software engineer starts by prompting a system endpoint. "A mobile app that counts things", "A website where horses can meet other horses"
02
The Agent evaluates app type, and prompts for Gaps. "should the app run on both IOS and Android?". "Should we include geldings or only breeding horses?"
03
The software engineer answers questions.
04
The agent builds the system and hosts it inside some sort of sandbox for review.
05
The software engineer tests the system and prompts bugs or changes
  1. Repeat untill done
  2. The interaction ends.

The ratings, in words

Speed

Highest

Control

Lowest

You might not even see the code. You may be able to 'eject' from the platform and have it dump out the code but then you need to work with a huge codebase you have never seen before #fun or find a software engineer with more skill who can do that for you #expensive.

Quality

Low to Medium

Depends on the implementation. There is scope within these products to leverage DRY principles, managed orchestration, guard rails, multi agent cross checking systems etc etc... but the extent to which they do so is unknown.

Safety

Low to Medium

Low to Medium, and it is the platform's safety, not yours. You review no code, so nothing is caught at the increment. Defects land in production because production is where the platform builds. Worse, the risk is systemic rather than per project. One platform flaw hits every app hosted on it. Base44 is the clean example, a single missing privacy check exposed private enterprise apps wholesale and the exploit needed nothing more than a URL. This is the exact inversion of the Tab Completion argument. There, safety is equivalent to your own skill. Here it is equivalent to the vendor's, and you have no visibility into it and no lever on it beyond choosing a different vendor. The guardrails that do exist were mostly retrofitted after an incident, and the failures were boring defaults rather than exotic attacks. Lovable shipped with row level security off, Replit ignored its own code freeze. Which is the thing worth remembering, a guardrail stated in the prompt is not a guardrail.

Brainrot

Highest

Complete handoff, complete brain melting. You might as well be spending 12 hours playing a brainrot mini game on PUBG Mobile (a friend gave me this example.. it's not me)

Token use

High

You are definitely paying for tokens whether you like it or not.

Best for

  • Prototyping

Tools

LovableReplitBase44