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.
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.”