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.
Professional coder turned vibe coder here. My approach has been to lean in really heavy on creating deterministic harnesses and guardrails, that can also be templated for bootstrapping new slop projects quickly and easily.
Then I end up just getting paid to press button make feature go brrrr, and on my other monitor I work on personal projects that I actually care about, while simultaneously being paid because I press button make feature go brrrr.
Spending the time curating my harnesses and workflows, including pretty rigorous automated testing of what Claude shits out, is what keeps it all together. You can’t just set it and forget it. Something about that is fun to me, though, because I am masochistic devops man.
I don’t understand why more people don’t realize this is the way to do things. Lately, Lemmys sound like a bunch of old people yelling at the sky and telling people to get off their lawn. Most of Lemmy users are around 30. Why the fuck are you all sounding like out-of-touch old men lately?!
Shit changes. Guess what? It’s been like this this for every industry forever. Adapt or lose. It’s always been that way, always will be that way. It’s just that until now, programmers were mostly immune.
But for the rest of us plebes, job fears and tech change has always been the norm. Welcome to our world.
But how I’ve always done it and always had an easy time, is to adapt and figure out how to work the system.
This whole “Imma quit because I don’t like it!” lemmy AI attitude is hilarious to me. If you can quit, then quit! If you can’t, the figure out a way to make shit work for you. In the end, your employer doesn’t give a shit what you like or don’t like.
As for all the copium sippers saying, “Well, AI isn’t nearly as good as I am at coding…” Cool! How much longer do you think that’s gonna be true? I remember when AI first started becoming the norm a few years ago, the naysayers would say, “But it can’t do fingers! AI will never fool anyone!” LMAO
How the fuck are you all tech people, yet you don’t realize that the tech you are seeing now is only gonna get better and more powerful?! Do you all suddenly turn off your logical brains when it comes to AI? It’s technology. This is early days. Look how powerful it is now, now imagine in 5 years.
If you all really think that you are always gonna be better at programming than AI will be in 5 years, well…fuck it. You kinda deserve what will happen to you.
If what you all were saying about how shit and weak AI is were true, then ya’ll wouldn’t have any reason to be mad or worried then, would you?
AI is only going to be better, faster, and more powerful. You all can downvote every single fucking AI post you see on Lemmy, but it won’t stop it.
I’ll adapt and still figure out a way to fuck over my useless bosses. I’m like @wesker@lemmy.sdf.org in that I go with the flow, laugh about and collect my paychecks while doing less work.
Ride the wave and learn how to surf it or go under.
(When I say “You” I meant most Lemmy readers, not you Dr. Wesker. You are aware of how shit works. I just can’t believe what you and I are doing seems to be so rare on Lemmy)
I genuinely can’t understand how anyone can work in tech and not find this stuff incredibly exciting. I acknowledge that all the stuff about AGI and singularities is bullshit, that the cast of characters promoting it is full of idiots and hucksters, and that there is a wild financial bubble behind that is going to pop catastrophically (and hopefully take OpenAI and Anthropic down with it) - but at the same time, it is one of the most exciting technological achievements of my lifetime and just being able to be a tiny part of it makes it an amazing time to be alive.
I question if any of the neo-luddites actually ever had any love of the industry they work in if the current progression of LLMs doesn’t amaze and inspire them.
Thanks for sharing your workflow. I’m already pretty fed up on how tech just keeps on adding layers upon layers of complexity. I love understanding what goes on. You can imagine I’m not thrilled.
These people are the ones causing the problems. They tell you they’ve got it all figured out make it sound great but they’re the ones shitting out garbage faster than you can fix it.
If you’re gonna talk shit about my skills you could at least @ me. I’ve worked decades in the industry, with a lot of that time knee-deep in dev tooling and devops. It’s a cake walk keeping an LLM on guard rails producing well-tested code if you’re a seasoned and sane architect, compared to say, humans. Sorry you can’t seem to wrap your head around it.
That doesn’t mean anything. I have seen senior developers who built up “street cred” for decades fall into the vibecoding trap and deskill themselves rapidly.
Wow, you sound as insufferable.
Congratulations on giving up your career, though. I’m sure the “architect” will take care of you.
I’m not sure how you gathered I gave up my career. I adapted to the trend, and now make more money with less effort. And when the wind changes, I’ll adapt again, until I’m put out to pasture.
This is the way. I’m flabbergasted that more people on Lemmy, who are more techie in nature, aren’t sharing the same attitude.
Lemmy is rapidly becoming “Luddite Central” compared to other places I mess around with online.
Lol
Seems like vibe coding is now all about setting up gard rails for the chatbot, which does not sound remotely fun to me compared to actually writing the code.
You’re not wrong, and to each his own. I’m a workflow and automation nerd, so it’s down my alley personally.
That’s pretty great actually!
I’ve so far managed to avoid being mandated vibe coding at work since I have some pull at the company, so I don’t have a ton of experience working with it.
How long does each brrrr take? Does it give you a reasonable amount of time to sink into a personal project before it completes?
I have hand-rolled agents/skills that run through a standardized process:
I leverage bash and python scripts whenever possible within harnesses, to try to avoid Claude injecting flair where steps and processes should be as repeatable as possible. I also write a lot of supplementary skills for it to use, with least-privilege scoping (important!), to give it access to do things like read work request tickets, run staging smoke tests, etc.
You can get to a point where you can basically say something like, “Investigate and plan SWE-1773” and it’ll do all the shit, spit out a human-readable markdown plan complete with mermaid diagrams. You then okay to execute it, and at the end do an earnest PR review, and some manual tests.
Each brrr is gonna depend on how thorough you need to be, feature sizes, and if it shits the bed during planning. But honestly, the likelihood of your LLM shitting the bed is heavily dependent on how good of a harness engineer you want to become. If you shape and mold the environment and workflow like someone who say, works in developer tooling, then output quality can become surprisingly reliable.
You said you work on personal projects while it brrrrs. Of course it depends, but are we talking personal projects 30s at a time, 10 min at a time, or an hour?
I’d say that in an ~8hr workday, an average of 60-70% of my workday is spent doing stuff I want to do.
I can’t comment on cadence. Protip is to leverage git worktrees, multiple Claude session, and then spin up multiple feature requests at a time. This maintains “productivity” expectations and gives you longer spans of time to “multi-task.”