Hello programmers! I’ve been making a living for a couple of decades figuring out stuff for people and coding whatever will make them happy. It’s fun. I’ve grown to prefer the people to the coding but I still get a kick out of the whole thing.
The problem is: at the job we’re being asked to pivot to vibe coding. At this point the order is to use it for all code, read the slop carefully, argue with the machine for way too long and only then open that PR. Massive productivity gains are expected. I’m appalled from an ethical, philosophical and professional standpoint. We’re a non-profit ngo ffs. My colleagues are fine with it. If I get even slightly critical the group goes awkwardly silent and I get comments on how all the programmers they know from other places don’t code anymore.
If this is how it goes from now on, I’m out. Is it really though? Are all businesses switching to vibe coding? Have some of you started switching career? I think I want to go to meatspace. Hand-made coding could make a cute hobby.
AI came at sort of a perfect time for me. I grew very tired of coding about, I don’t know, 5 or 10 years ago. No LLM in sight back then.
Now that I can do “coding” without the absolute bore of the process, I’m much happier. I find that I can accomplish projects that I have been dreaming about for decades.
Models keep getting better and cheaper. I can now drive the pretty capable Deepseek v4.1 flash pretty much 24h a day on my projects while spending something like 20 euros per month.
We have a junior who is honestly good at coding and a quick learner, but he refuses to use AI.
In the past, he’d definitely be praised for his food work. But now he’s being reprimanded because he’s too “slow” compared to the other junior vibe coders.
The vibe coders barely understand their own code though.
It’s an absolute headache, I fear for the future of the newer generations of software engineers. And I feel terrible for the guys that just wants to learn and grow. It’s such a fun profession if you get the room to discover, AI sucks all fun out of it.
As a senior myself, I focus a lot more on stuff besides coding now, but as somewhat of a mentor, fuck AI. People starting out are barely learning, if the AI bubble ever pop, they are fucked.
The jobs I have had over the last year have been heavily pushing it, yes.
Vibe coding means giving an LLM access to the entire repository and blindly accepting the very large pull requests it makes after you tell it what you want.
That is an insane way to do development and any company who does it will suffer.
What is becoming normal is AI assisted programming. The developer retains understanding of the codebase and uses an LLM to generate small boilerplate sections because it’s quicker than writing everything by hand.
Using LLMs to write code is perfectly acceptable as long as there is a human understands exactly what the code does. Do not give agency to the AI and you’ll be fine. Let it make decisions for you and you’ll be out of the job pretty quickly.
I am not a programmer, but related to a few. My cousin said his workplace actively evaluates people on token usage, where more is better. He has refined his prompts to burn as many tokens as possible.
Another relative said they only hire seniors now, and use AI for junior work. I told him there will be no more seniors in five years, doing things that way. Well, that’s a problem for later.
I think I’ll use this answer to reflect. So first, vibe coding means, to me anyway, taking w/e the ai spits at you without checking/understanding. Aside from that, like okay, check the code send the PR. But anyway, at one point in my life, I thought, hey it would be great to go from writing code to reviewing code by others. I thought that would be a stepping stone for me. After a carefully thought, that’s what ai code gen is in the end. One of those careful what you wish for kind of thing.
I do think LLM is here to stay, one way or another. Might be like the next compiler like a comment suggested. I also do think that any software developer/engineer is stronger candidate with AI than one who rejects it.
Using AI codegen feels like returning to a beginner all over again. Throwing shit at a wall, begging the AI to cooperate, getting frustrated because nothing works and I can’t do anything to fix it because none of the code is mine.
I swear this was a phase I grew out of after years of dedicated practice. Now I’m forced back into it again.
I’m a full time code monkey. Last week I met a woman who created an on-line app. I asked her, “Oh, you must be a software engineer!” She laughed and said, no - she made it with Claude in about six months.
I felt a little deflated. This, the job I studied for, got a Masters degree in, working full time. It’s being supplanted by someone with no experience and an idea.
Of course, the site was buggy with UI issues, but it still stick in my craw a bit.
The job you studied for and got a masters degree in (congratulations, sincerely) was hollowed-out and deskilled years ago; it has been profoundly depressing watching the industry taken over by people who think a 6 month vocational course in Typescript and 6 months of not getting fired qualifies them as a senior engineer, with absolutely zero understanding of basics like information theory or concurrency mechanisms or, well, any basic engineering. These are the fuckers who have been producing spaghetti applications built on a MySQL (God burn its soul in hell) database with no relational integrity (“foreign keys make it slow!”) and no thought to scalability or resilience that someone else then gets to fix when the shit hits the fan.
That those people are going to be replaced with AI shouldn’t give anyone pause to weep. The arrival of AI to do their jobs is an opportunity to reverse the deskilling the industry has spent the last three decades working on - one really genuinely good engineer with an AI can now replace one really good engineer tearing her hair out at the half dozen absolute idiots she is asked to work with to deliver anything today.
If you know what you’re doing and you know what good patterns look like then AI is a very good way to take some shortcuts and not have to write all the code yourself. It also keeps getting better. This is a super unpopular opinion on Lemmy, but I’ve been doing this job for 25 years and AI has only sped it up.
On the other end of vibe coding you have people who would never touch a compiler in their life if it wasn’t for AI, who are building practical, useful things in the real world. I think because Lemmy is so full of tech people that we often forget the tech serves larger purposes than just having nice code.
I think it’s also helpful to remember that short of an entire societal collapse we will never stop using these tools and they will only get better. The monolithic systems that are in place running the world are not going to change anytime soon. Even if we encounter a major correction of some sort these tools will only come back better and cheaper. You will never get everyone in the world to agree on regulation and at least one nation will march forward with progress unabated. You can hate the tech companies, the governments, the rich, the stupid, the right wing, the left wing, it doesn’t matter. We are locked on a course.
The price is also a big factor. They’re currently taking big losses, so your AI usage is being subsidized by investors. Eventually they’ll want a return on that investment, so the price is going to go up. Way up.
We don’t know yet whether AI is actually cost effective over just having a developer write the code. Or maybe it’ll be cost effective to use something on the level of Haiku for simpler stuff, and a human developer does the more complicated stuff.
I think it’s also helpful to remember that short of an entire societal collapse we will never stop using these tools and they will only get better.
I don’t think it will take a societal collapse to stop the use of these tools. Just someone at your company running a cost benefit analysis on it after the AI companies start charging the full price.
I was lucky to upgrade my GPU before the price increases, but the open weight models are quite alright for the moderate stuff, and electricity is much cheaper than the cloud token costs at the moment. So, unless HW prices will be forever high and that bleeds into the 2nd hand market too, I don’t think there will be at least some economical viability.
AI codegen is dumb as fuck. It doesn’t understand system design at all.
I do use it to catch careless mistakes in nonformal connected parts of code though.
I am working in a very small company as a software dev and write everything by hand. I wrote some weeks ago in a different thread here that I tried all of the LLM powered coding tools and found all of them subpar.
If this company goes downhill or I lose the job otherwise, I will work something entirely different.
My very arrogant point of view is that these “vibecoding” tools are being celebrated by people who were making shit software before and now make software that is slightly less shit in what they perceive is the same amount of time, but I suspect it takes them actually longer. Meanwhile, they don’t grow their programming skills at all.
people who can suddenly “”“make”“” things like minecraft mods are also a part of those celebrating, though i assume they’re a lot less vocal about it
and god i wish that was all it was used for
From what I can observe, yeah, pretty much the entire industry has shifted to LLM code generation. I’m sure (or at least I hope) there are still some shops that go out of their way to keep working like we did, you know, months ago. But beyond that… I’m not even sure the general public understands how quickly and how fully LLM codegen has become the norm. It’s grim.
I’m a systems architect who uses agentic coding to get around some executive dysfunction challenges with writing my own code. I learned about the dysfunction late in life; maybe meds will eventually get me to a point where I can consistently work on a personal code project without a looming deadline or social contract in the loop. For now I am part of the problem. Hi!
I look at agentic coding as a firearms problem:
- it lowers the barrier to execution: anyone with sloppy aim can point and pull the trigger, and do a lot of harm in the process
- both perform better in the hands of people with discipline and experience, but that doesn’t change the fact that LLMs and guns have massively proliferated and any idiot can get their hands on one (or that shitty people benefit from mass producing them)
- the industrial complex producing guns profits from murder, and the industrial complex producing datacenters profit from murder of the environment and attempts to eliminate jobs
- the same countries who treat gun control as an anathema tend to view AI control as an anathema
- analogies suck, they’re never perfect but they get the conversation started
That said, most of the people who hate AI also don’t know a damn thing about how they’re used correctly. It’s also not their fault. Sure, they’re under no obligation to be an expert about the thing that’s harming them. But there’s a bigger reason: the companies pushing this shit benefit from a world stage where people use them wastefully and inefficiently.
The short list of things most people don’t get:
Spoiler'd because most people also won't give a fuck.
- A LLM is like a ten year old with a doctorate who wants to impress you. It can answer random trivia off the top of its head, but it’s going to make shit up when it doesn’t know the answer.
- Never trust a LLM answer that was produced without a web search or web fetch. Pretend you’re that obnoxious algebra teacher who rolled their eyes at your calculator and told you to show the work during exams. Work for a LLM is tool calls: web searches and webpage fetches. Tell it to research documentation and best practices before you start. If you don’t, the answer you get will be dated by 1-2 years in the best case, and a confidently wrong hallucination at worst. (unfortunately you’re still at risk of being fucked because frontier labs use webpage summarization in these tool calls, and that summarization adds another vector for hallucinated shit; lovely)
- The baseline skills of the operator are more important than anyone gives credit. Your results scale to your own knowledge level and your use of the LLM to extend into adjacent subject matter. Employers don’t want to hear this: they want employees to go away. Frontier LLM labs don’t want employers to hear this: they need employers to buy into the delusion of eliminating their work force, and also financially benefit from people using the tools wastefully. (token burn = profit = the heat death of the universe as an afterthought, but that’s the next generation’s problem) Casual LLM critics don’t want to hear this: confidently incorrect echo chambers are the comfort food of anyone with an axe to grind about what they hate.
- Consistent results require controlling the probability space so that your pipeline swats the hand of the LLM when it’s lazy or generating slop. For coding, that means using languages or tooling that prevent major classes of problems to begin with (Rust, Go, Typescript) or toolchains that bitch about sloppy code (pytest-ruff + pytest-ty for Python). It means extensive unit tests that cover expressions of functionality, and knowledge of how to prompt out bad behaviors. (don’t rewrite tests to conform to “preexisting bugs”, always align tests to higher standards, etc.)
I could add another ten bullet points here, but I’m not here to prove that LLMs are capable of being useful. I’m here to demonstrate that it requires knowledge of a problem domain to get the best results. That means you can’t get rid of employees familiar with the knowledge domain. You need senior employees to get the best results, and you need junior employees so that they can eventually become senior employees. Same as it ever was. But because we’ve got useless fucking politicians who are too busy lining their own pockets instead of, I don’t know, regulating a worldwide memory shortage caused by a handful of companies, the whole thing is cannibalization of human society all the way down.
We could have scaled this to operate in the consumer space at a fraction of the energy costs (Apple SOC style versus energy inefficient hyperscaling) and used it as something to generate value by augmenting the capabilities of individual workers instead of trying to replace them wholesale. It only makes sense that it should have benefitted everyone considering this tech was built on shoving libraries worth of human achievement into a training pipeline (often without permission), right?
Nah. They profit more if we don’t own our own compute and everyone is encouraged to burn energy on treating the LLMs like all-knowing oracles instead of research tooling. They control the access to creations built on stolen knowledge. But hey, if everything else gets burned down in the process at least they come out on the other side rich and bailed out.
If you work for a company that prioritizes profit over quality - yes.
I no longer work in government IT, but from what I have heard from old colleagues, quality is still prioritized there and they are not forced to vibe code.
I read a retrospective from another team yesterday. They were preparing a demo for leadership and apparently it didn’t go so well. There were many reasons like last minute changes in requirements but one line was interesting for this discussion: The use of the LLM agents caused confusion about who is fixing which bug and taking on which tasks. The agents act like they’re alone in the codebase and keep adding and changing code broadly whenever they see an opportunity for improvement. And that often without specifically being prompted to do so. Now if you have multiple team members collaborating on a project with each their agents, chaos ensues because the agents are not coordinating and the diffs/commits become insane and the team doesn’t fully understand them.
This actually results in a necessity to test more and longer because nobody knows which bugs have really been fixed now and rapidly preparing for a release or a demo becomes more difficult than before.
In my opinion an LLM can be very useful to rapidly prototype something. Especially with an API or language you’re not familiar with. But for Production it’s still a huge risk to push code you don’t understand.
Those engineers are bad
