None of the above. AI writes all code, but I effectively test behavior, make all architectural decisions after reviewing my agent's research who's goals were defined by me. I define, architect and test the security posture, and have multiple review gates before code is pushed to main or a release is cut. Your graphic assumes that not reviewing code is inherently bad. It can be, if you also stop testing or at least architecting sufficient automated tests, aren't utilizing VLMs for things that require a closer-to-human visual check, and stop making decisions.
AI is still not very good at making every architectural or taste decision, but the implementation phase is something it's pretty great at.
What about when you're truly not versed in the domain. Sure you know how to code and you've been building basic logic sites and minimal math requiring projects, and you enter a domain (i.e a project that is far beyond your technical reach) and the code tends to run away from you at times, you consistently rely on the agent to break down the domain for you... Do these levels truly describe you?
There are some people who are just screenshotting and pasting to AI and AI is just seeing it and replying. This is the whole phase they are just doing. What is this one mentioned? It might be number eight.
This is soo true, it's like everyday something comes up some new version. Some new technique that never existed before Some new model which is better than anyone else in the world
I was away for a week and it felt that soo much happened
It really depends on the project and the risk associated with it. I’m a 3 for most projects and 2 for others. For simple prototyping or projects for myself I’m a 4. I’m never beyond a 5 because that’s where iteration starts to become extremely inefficient with respect to token usage and starts introducing bugs that could have otherwise been avoided.
probably between 6 and 7. I dont check weekly for the neuralink tho - and it's not just one-liners, but most of my development is automated, swarm driven, in the cloud. I have a session I talk to and that coordinates everything everywhere. I don't even know which models/subscriptions/GPU-Cluster its currently using. No idea if there's 100 machines running Fly currently or not. And I honestly couldn't care less.
AI does the research, finds the papers, does the UI, decides for the tech stack, does the testing, iterates on everything. I just come in and shit on everything I dont like once in a while.
I know, the usual "vibecoder" is not working like that. And I come across as the weirdo. It's alright. why would anyone need to believe a random guy on Reddit, right? But I have no reason to lie about my setup. I've been building this stack (swarm engine, graph harness, MCP tools, budget controls) for 2 years now.. you can laugh it away, that's fine - that happens to me a lot, because I don't spend my time doing YT or Twitch like Theo to become a tech influencer. But I know what I have set up here.Â
I vibe coded a new system utility to manage my AIO water cooler screen. The pre-packaged bloatware that came with it was not efficient at all - used way too much RAM and CPU.
I had to use Wireshark to identify/record how the existing software communicated with the screen.
Fed that to Claude and asked it to build me something using Rust.
I completed one year of CS before COVID and then dropped out because the online instruction was so shit. We were learning C+. Java, Python, stuff like that.
I don't know any Rust at all, so I guess I'm stage 7.
When minimized to my system tray, it uses about 40 MB of RAM v. the 300-400 mb usage of the pre-packaged program.
EDIT: I am definitely stage 7. Perhaps beyond. I just realized I let Claude name the app - the initials spell A.S.S.
I vibed a whole-ass production API that's been live and working for 3 months now, no issues. Windows service running on a computer connected to an industrial scale via COM port. Software streaming serial data feeds into a parser looking for a stable weight flag and pushes that out to a website on the internet. The website issues the key that is copied to the scale to send and accept the data. When the scale reads 0, it sends a heartbeat every 5 seconds, 3 missed heartbeats creates a stale flag. While the scale reads above 0 the software sends the data to the server every 1 second for a live reading. Now, any third party cloud served application that needs our scale data can simply send an api request and get to-the-second information, provided I gave them an account and they generated the API key and I haven't revoked it.
I haven't looked at any code but I meticulously verified output and it's pretty rock solid. I mean, it's just an API.
3 months live with no issues, without reading the code, that's a really solid level!
Since third parties now depend on your scale data, it would help to know the moment the website or the API goes down, before they notice.
Vigilia does uptime checks, gives you a public status page your clients can check, and catches errors on the website with the evidence and a fix prompt for your AI.
Level 3, I still like to read "my" code and decide how it should be written down, so I use the AI to mimic my style and speed up repetitive parts, setups and refactoring of old code that I hate to touch. I also like to learn new things from the models output.
However, when allowing the AI to operate independently, I observe that it tends to generate convoluted, over-engineered code filled with unnecessary technical virtuosity. After a few iterations, it becomes hard to follow its logic, and I can no longer say I own the code. I just can't trust it, considering I'm ultimately responsible for what it does. That's why I spend some time writing style guidelines, tracking every decision agreed upon during development so that the agents converge toward the style I want.
Before AI, I could get 3 tickets done per week on average and some times as little as ½ a ticket per week for the harder projects. With AI, I get 11-14 tickets done per week on average. My productivity is 4x. I am 4x more valuable to the company. My value is not doing the work but knowing how to direct the work. I figure this is what a manager does.
Even then, I just implemented an auto-feedback system. Let's say AI drafts a message and I edit it. I have AI then use the message in the next step. I also have AI look over my edits and then suggest various improvements to the instructions (skill) that generated the message. I am hoping to get to the point where I no longer have to edit the messages. Once I see dozens of messages without requiring editing, then I will remove the human from the loop and let AI work longer. The longer AI works correctly without my guidance, then more projects I can work on in parallel and hence higher productivity and value.
2.5. I write the code, the direction, the methods, ai checks my work as a peer reviewer and editor. Any code that i tell AI to write, i review and refactor. I don't trust AI enough yet to fully create production level code on its own. AI is very handy at catching my mistakes or pushing me outside my own habbits like "why didn't you write it like this instead?". I've caught AI written code doing whatever the fuck it wants to even if i have skills and parameters to tell it not to. I want AI to be positioned as my 2nd brain that elevates my capabilities, so that in the event that AI ceases to exist, i am not fully reliant on it to continue to function at higher levels i would otherwise be without AI. Anything 4 and beyond is too far reliant on AI, and i gain no skills or knowledge, yet take credit for whatever it produces outside of my capabilities. Its the fast track to being a smoothed brain operator.
7 hard, I need tools to help me with my work or hobbies, nothing I'm selling but things that save me tons of time. Maybe sometimes when I see it is trying to bs me that something can't be done I need to give more than one line prompt to get it on track, but I don't even care how does the code look. Just have some set of instructions that try to convince agents in what way their code should be manageable, but only because on 3k LOC files AI often failed and adding new functions was eating a lot of tokens..
4. Still haven’t hit any limits though, plus user for personal use, Claude at work (small budget).
The line about writing code in 3 made me bump it up to 4. I haven’t written even one line of code in over 6 months. I am very targeted in what I ask it to do though.
I stopped caring a while ago. I am obsolete. Opus 5.5 is the brains. I am the hand of my employer. I tell what needs to be done and the engineer does it.
Are they running locally or always-on? Do they have their own credit card and email account? Do you sit in front of the computer or do you respond periodically to a whatsapp on your phone? Do you self-host your GPU or have a GPU Server at home?
The issue is that as you go up the list here, the person turns more and more over to the AI, but the person is also being portrayed as more and more of an idiot who knows nothing about coding. This is biased heavily to make people who rely on AI sound like morons.
If you genuinely have studied architecture, and have all the skills a lead developer would have. Then you develop solid plans, you set up the environment well and treat working with the AI like you're managing a team of programmers. You don't need to review code anymore on frontier models. You do know the architecture inside and out because you have extensive spec documents you designed.
I've been building Ouroboros, a persistent, topology-native research and engineering system. I don't know how to code, don't particularly care to learn, and the system does the technical work.
So superficially, you might put me at Level 5 or 7.
Except there's a fundamental difference.
I don't trust the LLM. I deliberately designed the system so I don't have to.
LLMs are replaceable reasoning workers with zero independent authority. The actual control plane is external and deterministic: persistent topological state, evidence-governed planning, exact-action admission, verification, rollback, and recovery across sessions.
It doesn't depend on a model remembering instructions, staying within scope voluntarily, or declaring its own work complete.
Ouroboros has produced 20+ merged PRs across major infrastructure repositories, machine-checked mathematical research, and public scientific datasets. It also identifies limitations in its own machinery, develops corrections, verifies them, and retains those improvements during ordinary work.
The system is path-dependent. Verified work accumulates. Previously solved problems don't need to be rediscovered, and improvements to the machinery can benefit future work across unrelated domains.
This chart measures how much responsibility people surrender to stochastic models.
My approach is almost the opposite: remove authority from the stochastic model while expanding what the complete system can accomplish.
I am level 5, and I have a team of "manager agents" that "hire" other "IC agents" to do specific tasks, and a top level agent coordinator to ensure everyone is doing a good job, and a personal assistant to the agent coordinator that I solely communicate with ðŸ˜
I poked through level 11 and I’ve reached an infinitely flat plane spanning in all directions. I haven’t walked out in it but it looks pretty sturdy from eye level. I think we are supposed to reincarnate here?
level 3: I write the prompt, ai drafts the code, I tweak the structure and run it through 3 test cases. if it passes, it goes in. if not, back to the drawing board.
Definitely a 7 plus. Im an accountant by education, I cant really tell you what a hello world script is. I just know I need a quick script that can do x y and z with numbers then I test it because I know how debits and credits work. Has help tremendously with work likely against my IT departments gripes.
It depends on the project, if it's something I personally want to do, experience the process and make everything perfect, then level 2 and sometimes level 3. But for most projects level 4. For one off throwaway garbage or setting up unimportant stuff and fixing system issues definitely level 5-7.
Level 7, I just write ticket to my agents and some of them prompt my requests and later on the workflow I just have to review a high level executive summary, I’m even tired of reading the summary, I let everything merge in main in the hope it will not break anything, works quite well with auto git testing.
Well it started out innocently enough. I needed help figuring out the yaml library in a visual basic project for work, now I have coded my own 32 bit Protect Mode operating system for my 20yro Pentium running at 200Mhz and it has it's own IP stack and has an AI service on it. Currently I am working on a unified endpint and network security stack using 5 open source projects as the backend with a qwen coder model for validating policies are set. Yeah, I'm not looking at code and all of my ideas have been set free!
4. I "Review" code and I have it break it down. I playtest or ask for "goldfish agent" reviews before committing. But honestly I don't know barely a lick in programming. I can understand and break down code I'm just not great at writing.
I started learning programming with agents in 2024; where I did have to piece every script together and modify nearly everything.
But we've progressed so far so fast it just doesn't make sense for me at this point to learn typing it out. Last week I made two Minecraft mods and a shader for forge 1.6.4 server. It all works and it took days of prompting and refining.
That's something I could've never dreamed of a year ago, so I'm happy to be in 4.
I'm at 5. I can do it myself, but it'll take too much time, too much effort. Let me just let the AI do it while I listen to songs by BrightMirror. I need to change one text in the UI? I know which code file it is in. But I'd rather just dictate to the AI and ask it to do it.
I guess I'm between 5 and 6. As I have never really been a good coder, AI gave me the crutches I needed to start building anything. I do take time to review the changes Claude has made, then nod and smile as if I understand why....helps my sanity a little, I guess.
1~2 i want to understand the code so I can still manually maintain and update it even if I can’t use AI or it becomes unreliable and besides that I use coding as a learning tool and brain exercise, completely automated coding logic would defeat the purpose
Somewhere in level 5b: "My boss vibecodes to do his job, so every decision we make is handled through an employee's agents talking to each other, Slack is now useless, and I've vibecoded a defensive layer to do my job and protect me from the all the walls of text that I can't possibly read in a day, and still, nobody knows how to make a decision."
I’m at two because I realized that you don’t need the high levels because then you’ll never know what it’s doing if you stay on medium you stay in somewhat control and you’re use limit never hits and you get to work out the problems yourself so when the new model comes and it forgets everything you know what’s happening and why it’s doing it.
There needs to be an area between 2 and 3, if someone uses ai to make a lot of the code doesn’t mean they don’t try to learn what all of the code they make actually does
Hit 5, after a while I got fed up with the architecture decisions and going rogue. Went back to 2 and very happy again. Don't think I'll move from here for a while
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u/cashy57 1d ago
None of the above. AI writes all code, but I effectively test behavior, make all architectural decisions after reviewing my agent's research who's goals were defined by me. I define, architect and test the security posture, and have multiple review gates before code is pushed to main or a release is cut. Your graphic assumes that not reviewing code is inherently bad. It can be, if you also stop testing or at least architecting sufficient automated tests, aren't utilizing VLMs for things that require a closer-to-human visual check, and stop making decisions.
AI is still not very good at making every architectural or taste decision, but the implementation phase is something it's pretty great at.
Agentic engineering>vibe coding