Chapter 9: Five Levels of AI Coding and the User Story Driven Endgame

"Vibe Coding only describes a very primitive stage. The endgame should be user-story-driven development."

Extended reading: How user stories enable horizontal complexity transformation, see From Vertical to Horizontal Complexity. For the complete knowledge workflow that connects user stories to code, see Meeting Recording→PRD→TDD→Code—AI-Native Team's Knowledge Workflow.

1. From Vibe Coding to Machine Manager

Today, many people using AI IDEs (like Cursor) stay at a very primitive stage:

• Think of something and type a paragraph in Chinese
• Have AI help "do this requirement"
• Look at the effect, roughly works is fine

This is so-called Vibe Coding:
More of a feeling-based, unclear-boundary, unstructured way of using it.

But if you extend the timeline, you'll find AI coding users actually have a very clear "rank evolution path":

"At the beginner level, the programmer is still thinking like a human.
At the intermediate level, the programmer starts thinking like a machine.
At the advanced level, the programmer becomes a manager of machines."

2. Five Levels of AI Coding Users

A relatively clear classification can be:

1. Inexperienced AI Coding Users

   • Use Chinese, aimless, think of something and do it
   • Don't realize context window is limited
   • Don't realize AI IDE hasn't read your entire codebase

2. Proficient AI Coding Users

   • Realize they should use English
   • Realize context window is limited
   • Realize Cursor doesn't read your file's full text, but does fragment retrieval

3. Users Who Have Solidified Their Own Workflows

   • Have a stable prompt pattern and workflow
   • Can quickly apply their own Cursor rules, command-line tools, templates

4. Issue Tracker Level Users

   • Use MCP, Issue Tracker, and other tools, treating "one issue / one requirement" as the core unit of collaboration
   • Can simulate a complete team collaboration flow around one issue (requirement → design → development → testing)

5. User Story Driven AI-Native Teams

   • The entire system is completely transformed to AI-Native:
     • User story is a first-class citizen
     • AI can work asynchronously and in parallel
     • Can have 100 user stories in different stages progressing in parallel simultaneously