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.
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.
One question I have for the slop advocates in this thread is this - do you not like programming? Did you fall for the „learn to code“ meme and just learned the bare minimum to get a paycheque working on web dashboards?
Like why would you voluntarily cut out the most enjoyable part of the job, and go around scoffing at people who don’t want to do that?
Productivity is my boss’s problem, not mine, and I’d rather go and try and farm geese (I hate geese) than spend my whole day reading LLM generated code.
I use LLMs for code development, but I’ve found it’s only good for (a) boilerplate-level stuff I already know how to do and don’t want to deal with, or (b) VERY small tasks. Anything even moderately complex (at least by my opinion) blows LLM’s context budget and it instantly produces trash (any moderately comp-sci-interested highschool intern would write better code) that costs more time to analyze and fix than it would have taken to write it from scratch in the first place.
I like to code. I like tools. There is a trap in using the LLM tool for everything. A Maslow’s hammer and everything looks like a nail type of trap.
“LLM is just to replace the boring parts”
The boring parts so far:
- Writing and reading emails (aka communicating in the written form with other humans)
- Taking notes in meetings (aka paying attention to people when they speak to you)
- Documenting systems (aka letting your future self know what was going on in [insert year])
- Designing systems (aka letting your present self know what is going on)
- Building systems (aka doing your fucking job)
What is even the non boring part? Ordering machines around? Whatever happened to “ideas are cheap execution is everything”?
I’m far from a slop advocate, so this is more of a devil’s advocate point: plenty of code writing is not enjoyable.
If I’m working on my own project, to my own standards, writing exactly what I want to write I’m usually going to get enjoyment out of it. That’s pretty commonly not the case when writing code for an employer. Maybe the tech stack sucks, the product is inane or worse, you think the feature is a dumb idea but have to do it anyway, you’re bending over backwards to work around tech debt that you’re not allowed by management to fix, or you have to appease incompetent/out of touch architects or tech leads who presume to tell you how to do your job. I personally don’t enjoy writing that code very much. At a certain point it’s almost like nails on a chalkboard if you genuinely enjoy programming for its own sake: you know what good would look like, you know how far away what you’re working on is from good, and you feel sad at all the organizational inertia you’d need to overcome to get to good or, choosing not to do that, at compromising your standards. That bugs me, at least, and at a certain point makes it hard to even start certain work projects.
LLMs can make this at least bearable. Rather than spending hours looking into the change yourself, writing all of the code, fighting the shitty test framework and swearing at the past engineers who made it so bad, you let the robot figure it out and review its work. The result may still suck, but it was going to suck if you wrote it by hand too, for reasons largely out of your control. You can’t be fully hands off, and you still have to deal with the things you don’t like to get a good result, but you put yourself a step away from what bothers you and by doing so make it a little more pleasant. And, when you find work that’s actually fun, interesting, or rewarding, you just cherry pick that for yourself. I’ve grown to appreciate them for this reason. I have a lot less dread for the nails on a chalkboard work than I used to, anyway.
When my AI fucks up code I sometimes think “I probably would have fucked that up too”. And then I make it write 50 more tests in 2 minutes so it doesn’t happen again. The ROI in time saving is too tantalizing for me to be a meat-only code monkey.
It does really need all those tests. But they probably should have existed anyway and I’m damn sure most devs out there weren’t going to be so obsessive with coverage.
I hate tdd. But this is what happened and now I am so glad they birthed that unholy methodology
I love programming. I’m ok with others having access to programming that otherwise wouldn’t. I’m not having as much fun being a project manager instead. I don’t scoff at handwork coders. I’m also not going to pretend that they don’t code poorly without guidance. If you know coding you will be better at using them, but not significantly. I miss coding. I don’t understand quite why you are angry that I want to eat and provide for the family?
I don’t understand quite why you are angry that I want to eat and provide for the family?
Because it’s neither necessary nor morally neutral.
It’s not necessary that my family eat?
Writing code was never “the job”, that is just the trivial typing part you do when the thinking and designing ends. The job is solving problems (which I enjoy very much thanks.)
This is like people who refuse to program in another language because they are “a .NET programmer”. That just tells me you’re a coder not an engineer. In my career I’ve been paid good money to write C51 assembler, C, C++, Tcl, Limbo, Java, C# and Rust (roughly in order) - LLMs are just what’s next.
I have written in hundreds of languages, but syntax is syntax. The job was writing code. That’s what we mean when we say “coding”. We dont mean “pressing keys”. We don’t mean “writing a romance novel”. This argument is empty as the robots suggestion pattern for your SaaS bl
If your job was writing code, and not designing solutions to solve problems, for which code was just the final expression - then I’m sorry, you do need to find a new career. Best of luck.
It’s idiotic to continue arguing that a coder and coding is not interchangable with programmer or developer, that you don’t understand what people mean and mansplain about a job that never existed, except long ago when they had women make punch cards that were already written. It’s utterly useless to teach a difference in words that is wrong and a distinction that doesen’t exist. Do you think the layman will start to use your dissasociated term for coder and hallucinate a job description that doesen’t exist.
I have literally no idea what you’re trying to say. But I’m happy for you, though. Or sorry that happened.
Writing code was never “the job”
You have some kind of trauma that makes you cling and ask about this idea but no, writing code is a way of saying programming. The act of coding. Your idea of someone that only press buttons for someone else is fabricated. It did exist as a job, when we used punch cards, but that is not what you mean.
The responses to your question makes me fear for the future of products.
I use LLMs for scaffolding, boilerplate stuff, and basically things I can trust a junior with. For anything else, I have been forced to write it myself or rewrite it because the agents were so goddamn awful at it.
Reading that people even think programming has nothing to do with code and is just solving problems is just nuts to me. Code is a spec for a problem solution. If someone thinks the spec is neither important nor that being able to understand the spec is important… It’s like saying “I don’t care how this bridge is designed, it’s built”. Say that again and tell me it doesn’t sound nuts.
It explains a lot about the industry before the advent of LLMs. I always wondered why Node.js took over in web dev so quickly and that so many people only care about having something done makes sense. I just wish they weren’t destroying one of my few favourite things about humanity (Open Source Software) while they wallow in their own misery.
LLM won’t destroy OSS for me. It will actually be the only thing left to use because proprietary software will be the first place for LLMs to take over.
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.
The jobs I have had over the last year have been heavily pushing it, yes.
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.
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.
it’s not gonna last. if you tune out of the hype and actually look at some hard data, vibecoding stops looking so hot: https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/08/12/ai-software-development-what-does-the-data-say/
the current token costs are unsustainable also. the only ones making bank right now are the shovel sellers: https://isaiprofitable.com/
personally i’m working on hand-rewriting several projects vibecoded out by a non-dev in a small shop. not only is a lot of this straight up broken nonsense, the amount of tech debt is staggering. previous job wasn’t better, i had to spend more time fixing slop from former coworkers than actually introducing new features. keep your skills sharp and persevere. we’ll get through this.
tl;dr: this, too, shall pass. but holy shit.
keep your skills sharp and persevere. we’ll get through this.
We’ll be the next generation that writes malware no one can stop
It’s absolutely going to last. IMO until Astra the models were not good enough to really be worth bothering with, but we’ve reached a tipping point.
And while I still do read the code they make and then fix things (or tell them to do things differently), it’s still waaaay quicker than doing it “by hand”.
Sorry but if you’re expecting this to be a temporary thing you’re going to be very disappointed.
IMO until Astra the models were not good enough to really be worth bothering with, but we’ve reached a tipping point.
People said the same about older models.
Yep. Every. Single. One.
I agree with you except for the Astra bit. The differences in day to day are marginal at best (compared to both Sol and Anthropic equivalents) and the paradigm shift came long before it.
It’s copium, which is understandable. I think it’s really important for people who want to have a reliable career in the industry 5+ years from now, to learn harness coding even if begrudgingly.
You know the current state of IT security? It’s bad.
Aand here comes AI. It will not make it better, even though it finds some issues faster.If vibe coding remains the norm and is actually sustainable, there won’t be a reliable career. You’ll be weavers being put out of work by the autoloom. You’re worthless to them. What can you do that someone with six weeks (or less) of training can’t?
But being able to ship small, mildly broken, internal tools for my non-technical coworkers quickly is actually amazing.
Nobody cares if the internal tool code is nice, but when it shaves 50% of the work off of sales the sales team gets excited. So if I vibe up a shitty UI it’s still a net gain.
I’ve probably automated away like 60% of the ad hoc work I used to get into internal tools, and that has helped a ton with workload and budget.
Careful. You know how it goes with temporary workarounds? Suddenly, you find yourself maintaining slightly broken load-bearing slop.
That’s a fair concern, usually I only vibe the UI.
I’m not a front end guy, so as long as I know the backends is good I’m fine with it.
Yeah, it’s only the user’s experience fucked over when the UI is sloped together.
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.
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.
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.
Lol
I’ve worked decades in the industry
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 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.
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:
- investigate
- plan
- execute
- self-review
- open PR
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?
Work at a saas company in silicon valley, pretty much all the code being written is from an LLM here. Everything is still reviewed by humans, and a bunch of rounds of LLM reviews as well though.
Productivity has gone up as far as I can tell, we are shipping more features with a smaller staff. Support cases also seem to be going down, at least ones that reach an engineer like me since a lot are being resolved earlier in the escalation chain by a support technician, or just the customer talking to the built in helper LLM in the product.
Our token spend is pretty high though, looking like I’m at $1,200 on the month so far, so there’s that but don’t hear to many complaints from the finance department yet…
I’m liking the transition, as I have less work now. My day is a lot more waiting on the AI to complete a task or waiting for a human reviewer to do a pass on the code so I can spend more of my time doing important things, like scrolling on lemmy.
As for the future, I don’t think this is going away as much as everyone else in this thread seems to be wish casting for that to happen. The coding agents and models are only getting better, and tokens will only get cheaper as the data centers come on line. Long term I’ve been looking into becoming an electrician, but for now the economics don’t make sense with my current salary, so sticking with it until they lay me off…
I’m with you. Nearly same story, finance sector, east coast. It’s fun. It’s relaxing and I tinker with so many projects I never would have had the time for.
What you described is not vibe coding. Vibe coding is when you don’t read the code.
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.
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.
There’s a long history of codegen fads. This isn’t the first one. (Though it does have many unprecedented aspects.)
Here are some thoughts to bring you comfort:
- This can’t last. Everything from the economics of the vendors, to the inevitability of customers blowing their limbs off, to the diminishing returns on an AI-heavy process, to the depletion of the talent pool that makes responsible supervision/auditing possible, to impending model collapse… It has to end eventually. It may take a while, but it will happen.
- In the meantime, with tokens being sold way below cost, you can get a helluva deal on some cheap custom software if you’re smart about where and how you use it. I’m “encouraged” to use AI at work, and 90% of my use is for peripheral tools to make my own workflow easier — not load-bearing production code.
- It makes a fantastic cover for skunkworks projects. If you have a thing you’ve been wanting to do but can’t get it through the front door, use it as a “test project” for AI. You don’t have to actually vibe code it. Have Claude write some docs or commit messages or some esoteric test suite. Just something you can point to.
In the future there will be a huge job market for un-vibing code bases, I guarantee it
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.
