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.
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.
What you described is not vibe coding. Vibe coding is when you don’t read the code.
Vibe coding is fart coding whether you checked it or not. You still cheated and you didn’t use your own cognitive utilities…
OK what game am I playing, and who wrote the rules that say I cheated?
That was more of a royal “you” because I think we’ve all been guilty of it by now.
I don’t know who wrote the rules but I don’t think we should not be calling people vibe coders just because they reviewed it. That’s resetting us under a dystopian playbook.
I think your initial criticism is too easy to refute. If someone wants to criticize me for using LLMs because they’re bad for the environment or because they’re built on stolen IP, sure we can have that more nuanced discussion.
But telling me that I’m “cheating and I didn’t use my own cognitive utilities” – you have no idea how I use LLMs. You’re just assuming that I’m putting zero critical thought into the code I’m submitting. I review every line of code I submit, regardless of whether it was generated by LLM, written by hand, or a combination of both. And it is a laborious task; but my labor is more focused on decision making and designing tests than typing and fighting a compiler.
I haven’t measured my productivity in any meaningful way, so I won’t try to argue that LLMs are strictly more productive. That’s a separate discussion. All I can say is that I prefer the workflow where I can describe my thoughts in natural language and then review generated code more than writing the code myself.
Lmao the last line in this comment is literally you admitting you prefer avoiding to use your brain to code.
AI slop mfers will literally write a book in defense of their AI use and then go “but yeah, I actually do suck” at the end.
Explain how I’m not using my brain.
Also in what universe is 3 short paragraphs a “book”?
This isn’t wrong, but it isn’t relevant either.
How is it not relevant? The OP is propagating a misconception.
Because you know what he’s talking about and aren’t actually addressing the problems in question.
No, vibe coding is what happens when a new technology spawns, and everyone is in a gold rush to find out what they can use it for.
LLM assisted software development is probably here to stay though. I’m also learning the ropes of this agentic stuff, where it works and where it falls flat as I always try to fully understand and take ownership of the code I put in my commits. At the end of the day, it needs to look like I coded it.
On an aside, I’m hopeful we can figure out an ethical way to do model training that respects licensing, such as only training on MIT licensed code. Such a rabbit hole the ethics are.
I have a co-worker that worked on a system with Kafka and some RDF inspired schema for the messages. He found a documentation page for an app using it telling bullshit about it and it is quite obvious made by AI without review. Even the first sentence was idiotic and wrong, so useless even for another LLM.
I’m happy I left software development two years ago, now I only have to occasionally deal with researchers using LLMs to generate crappy code instead of writing crappy code themselves. And of course suffer the consequences of vibe coding as a user of crappy software.
What have you switched to career wise?
Electrical engineering research.
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.
Just don’t do it, if you don’t want. Noone can pull the plug on your will. Only you can.
I’m already branded as practicing the cardinal sin of resisting change. They can’t make me vibe code, but they can absolutely fire me. I’d rather leave on my own terms.
Not to fire you up… better leave yesterday. It got rather quiet due to LLM usage, but when the shit hit’s the fan who’s going to beg on their knees? The more you use it the more you also train it. Most people think they are using a product, but again they fooled everyone into becoming the product.
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.
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.
The jobs I have had over the last year have been heavily pushing it, yes.
I read a geography meme book last week. Non-ai users have wrinklier brains. Don’t worry.
It’s normalized now but I don’t see it lasting. I’m retiring at the end of this year cause I’ve had enough of it and I don’t want to wait anymore for companies to finally figure it out. I’ve told so many what needs to change, what they need to do in order to fix their builds (mainly consisting of rebuild it, rehire the devs you laid off, use AI as a rubber duck only) and none of them listen. They thank me for my time, cut a cheque, and send me on my way. I had the idiotic notion of trying to change things, hopefully make some people see the light but they’ve all drunk the kool-aid and have all pushed all their poker chips in and are currently hoping it works out. it won’t.
Any dev worth their salt can look at what’s been produced and everything is garbage. everything. I’ve yet to meet a single developer of any level that has looked at something that’s been vibe coded and said “hey, that’s not bad!” It’s all crap. the ONLY things that would ever work is if the AI somehow managed to churn something out to be 100% complete and working on the first attempt. something that will never need to be upgraded or scaled or something that would never interact with the user space. Name me something that does that.
The issue as it stands right now is it’s taking too long to fail. it will fail, I guarantee you that, but it’s taking too long. Developers and programmers and engineers can’t wait anymore. They’re not keeping their skills up because many just don’t see a point. Many have been unemployed from the field for so long now they’ve taken different career paths. We’re simply losing developers due to time.
It should have happened by now, should have happened months ago. the gaps in training data are increasing. you get way more hallucinations than solutions. the tool is absolutely worthless but the problem is the people utilizing the tool don’t know any of this. thus token use increases.
What are your thoughts for using AI to colour in & do the tedious bits? So you plan out the structure of what you’re trying to do, work out the individual pieces and get the AI to do a bunch of the (well specified) leg work. I’ve found it fairly reliable like this, especially for things that involve looking up function parameters in unfamiliar APIs. But this does depend on a thorough look over what comes out as well. No doubt there’s still issues that can pop up but generally have found it to be useful overall
If the API is unfamiliar how do you know what it puts out is the best way to use the API without going and reading the docs anyway?
Sure if you need it to work with that level of detail/efficiency then you’ll need to understand the code thoroughly as well. If you need it to draw a dashed line and you get a dashed line then that is fine by me. Looking up the argument differences between matplotlib plt.plot and plt.scatter for example can take quite a bit of time for fairly trivial things
Personally I don’t allow the AI to write any code. I do use AI but I mainly use it for debugging and as a sort of glorified rubber duck that I can bounce problems off. check my code, see what’s wrong with it, see what it recommends, and based on my own knowledge know the right direction to proceed. It still gets things wrong most of the time but at least it can point me down a path that I know will be the correct one.
I used to use it to craft boilerplates/bootstraps and at first it did it well enough but lately it even fucks that up. so I don’t bother. I honestly don’t even trust it to do the tedious writing. It’s a useful idiot at this point.
I’m thinking of taking a sabbatical for a few years and hoping it’s less insane after… I have the money to do it but I’m worried it either won’t get better or I’ll find it hard to get back into work afterwards.
Basically what I feel like, except I’m too young and I’m not even close to not needing a salary. I’ve been pushing back; I bought some time. I’ve spent all my willpower on this now and the cancer is still growing. I’m pretty much done. The uncertainty that comes with career change doesn’t look so bad anymore compared to whatever this “work” feels like.
It’s honestly a shame and on behalf of other devs my age and older I apologize. We let you down. I’d say start looking into FOSS projects or contributing to them but man even I’m getting out of those as most are also drinking the AI Kool-Aid especially in the Linux FOSS space. it’s gotten REALLY bad for Linux based projects within the past year. they’re actively killing any progress made on “The year of the linux desktop” I don’t see that happening, ever.
I’ve switched to Linux on my personal computer a few years back and I was so happy I did. Seeing pillar distributions like Debian open up to the slop is immensely depressing. As you’ve said FOSS is unfortunately not a sanctuary.
OS maintenance, like Debian, is tons of tedious busywork, most of it is quite literally just pulling from upstream packages, making sure there is no conflicts or certain types of labeled bugs, and that it meets the licencing and policy standards. So long as they are checking the code, I could see open-source projects benefiting substantially from LLM usage. The one thing that FOSS projects have is a lack of manpower.
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’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.
