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.
This is not my experience. What worries me, is that I see posts like this all across the internet:
Anyway, if it works well for you, then I am happy for you. If you feel the need to evangelise, I think it would be more effective if you include some of your personal experience and include what is bad along with what is good.
Here is my personal experience from this Thursday:
The issue there is that yo are using a model that is well behind the frontier for coding (google havent released a new pro model for a year now) and using the chatbot interface. When people talk about using LLMs for coding it is using agents that can take action, see when things go wrong, do their own research and correct their failures. If you had been doing that I doubt you would have lost a day having to fix things up.
You still might have had to do the work by hand, thats an outcome that can happen, but it would have got to the point of “this service cant do that” by itself without time wasting back and forth with you.
We’re going towards a world where we can’t trust code anymore than we can trust images or videos. People all over the place are entrusting their entire jobs to AI and consumers have to deal with the output.
Software engineering has always been bad. People just copy pasted stack overflow. Now an LLM copies stack overflow and the documentation.
If you seriously think that’s what software engineering was and still is, I feel sorry for you. You think opensource software is just a series of copy-pastes from stack overflow with no understanding?