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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I dunno about Sol but Anthropic models at least are waaay slower (at least x2) and also write that really annoying AI prose - it’s not this, it’s that, and so on. Astra doesn’t do that, or at least not enough to be annoying.
Sol is pretty fast from my experience, but still does the same thing that everything before it did: generate plausible code that I need to correct (and often rewrite) afterwards.
I haven’t used Astra yet, but I don’t really expect it to change that. Once it becomes available at work, I’ll give it a shot of course, but my expectations aren’t very high.
Edit: turns out I have Astra at work. It meets my expectations. I’ve had to rewrite a bunch of test code it generated and point it to the docs for a library to show it that some methods were deprecated and soon to be removed.
It is heavily normalized in industry now.
I quit a job that added AI use to performance reviews super early. That was pure bureaucratic cancer and most of my good coworkers burned out and left. I don’t think I’ll ever work for a big corp again, I actually like my work so much more now.
At work I’m expected to use it, our clients want it, my boss likes that he can feel technical when writing tickets (they’re mostly wrong though, and the tickets solution instead of report and request). It genuinely can do some useful tasks that make sense to use it for.
There are real pros and cons, but there’s no putting this back in the bottle. Philosophically I do hate it and everything it stands for, but practically it has allowed me to do a lot that I couldn’t (and wouldn’t) before.
The only good solution I’ve found is that you have to get your hands dirty and stay in the weeds. You cannot let it run off and do what it wants, you have to drive and then tag it in. When you vibe code something you’ll find yourself in three weeks resolving an issue and going “wait, it does what?!”, and of course, arguing with the gibberish Claude or GPT claims is English but is actually the first stage of model collapse as the models reinforcement train on ever more distilled data. Plus, skill atrophy is real. Decide which skills to allow to atrophy carefully.
AI code review is good and useful. I used to use it as a first wave for obvious stuff, but it is actually decent and high trust now. Saves me some time on that.
It’s good at finding bugs and security issues, and one thing I actually really like is having it model a system as a state machine and enumerate all the possible states to find bugs — especially concurrency bugs. I don’t work in a provable language, so this is hugely helpful.
I would be very hesitant to take a role where they push vibe coding or “agentic fleets” or loops or whatever. If you’re babysitting 6 Claude code sessions you aren’t working and you’re not in the loop on any of them. That will accumulate as tech debt and bog you down over time. It’ll suck your soul dry. It’s miserable.
Reading the slop and reviewing it “software factory” style is a very bad sign to me.
Some code is throwaway or disposable, vibing that makes sense to me. But the core work is more important than ever. Maybe the disposable code is the new part, I look at it like installing an IKEA kitchen, it’s slop, but it looks nice, the important part is the foundation and level flooring that enables the slop to stand up.
one thing I actually really like is having it model a system as a state machine and enumerate all the possible states to find bugs — especially concurrency bugs. I don’t work in a provable language, so this is hugely helpful.
Could you elaborate on that at all, finding bugs with a state machine approximating the system, how does that work?
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.
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.
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 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.
Maybe it’s just me but this sounds like torture to me. I have enough progress bars to wait for in my work day and I would rather do something else with my life if waiting and reviewing generated code becomes the bulk of it. It’s good to see that some people do seem to enjoy doing it so maybe there’s a chance I don’t have to.
AI codegen is dumb as fuck. It doesn’t understand system design at all.
I do use it to catch careless mistakes in nonformal connected parts of code though.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think it is like that everywhere though it is like that far too many places. I’m hopeful eventually people will realize it is unsustainable and reach an equilibrium where the usage will be less harmful, though we can’t say it’ll happen for sure or how long it will take if it does.
The fact everyone is listening to people saying it’s rocket fuel that aren’t the people who actually held the cart together in the before times is maddening, and it is equally maddening that the best devs have extra work mitigating the damage while it is essentially invisible and demoralizing work.
I’m a systems architect who uses agentic coding to get around some executive dysfunction challenges with writing my own code. I learned about the dysfunction late in life; maybe meds will eventually get me to a point where I can consistently work on a personal code project without a looming deadline or social contract in the loop. For now I am part of the problem. Hi!
I look at agentic coding as a firearms problem:
- it lowers the barrier to execution: anyone with sloppy aim can point and pull the trigger, and do a lot of harm in the process
- both perform better in the hands of people with discipline and experience, but that doesn’t change the fact that LLMs and guns have massively proliferated and any idiot can get their hands on one (or that shitty people benefit from mass producing them)
- the industrial complex producing guns profits from murder, and the industrial complex producing datacenters profit from murder of the environment and attempts to eliminate jobs
- the same countries who treat gun control as an anathema tend to view “AI” controls as an anathema
- analogies suck, they’re never perfect but they get the conversation started
That said, most of the people who hate LLMs also don’t know a damn thing about how they’re used correctly. It’s also not their fault. Sure, they’re under no obligation to be an expert about the thing that’s harming them. But there’s a bigger reason: the companies pushing this shit benefit from a world stage where people use them wastefully and inefficiently.
The short list of things most people don’t get:
Spoiler'd because most people also won't give a fuck.
- A LLM is like a ten year old with a doctorate who wants to impress you. It can answer random trivia off the top of its head, but it’s going to make shit up when it doesn’t know the answer.
- Never trust a LLM answer that was produced without a web search or web fetch. Pretend you’re that obnoxious algebra teacher who rolled their eyes at your calculator and told you to show the work during exams. Work for a LLM is tool calls: web searches and webpage fetches. Tell it to research documentation and best practices before you start. If you don’t, the answer you get will be dated by 1-2 years in the best case, and a confidently wrong hallucination at worst. (unfortunately you’re still at risk of being fucked because frontier labs use webpage summarization in these tool calls, and that summarization adds another vector for hallucinated shit; lovely)
- The baseline skills of the operator are more important than anyone gives credit. Your results scale to your own knowledge level and your use of the LLM to extend into adjacent subject matter. You’re also the one best equipped to notice when the LLM did something stupid, and the best one to refine the process so that there are fewer stupid outcomes. Employers don’t want to hear this: they want employees to go away. Frontier LLM labs don’t want employers to hear this: they need employers to buy into the delusion of eliminating their work force, and also financially benefit from people using the tools wastefully. (token burn = profit = the heat death of the universe as an afterthought, but that’s the next generation’s problem) Casual LLM critics don’t want to hear this: confidently incorrect echo chambers are the comfort food of anyone with an axe to grind about what they hate.
- Consistent results require controlling the probability space so that your pipeline swats the hand of the LLM when it’s lazy or generating slop. For coding, that means using languages or tooling that prevent major classes of problems to begin with (Rust, Go, Typescript) or toolchains that bitch about sloppy code (pytest-ruff + pytest-ty for Python). It means extensive unit tests that cover expressions of functionality, and knowledge of how to prompt out bad behaviors. (don’t rewrite tests to conform to “preexisting bugs”, always align tests to higher standards, etc.)
I could add another ten bullet points here, but I’m not here to prove that LLMs are capable of being useful. I’m here to demonstrate that it requires knowledge of a problem domain to get the best results. That means you can’t get rid of employees familiar with the knowledge domain. You need senior employees to get the best results, and you need junior employees so that they can eventually become senior employees. Same as it ever was. But because we’ve got useless fucking politicians who are too busy lining their own pockets instead of, I don’t know, regulating a worldwide memory shortage caused by a handful of companies, the whole thing is cannibalization of human society all the way down.
We could have scaled this to operate in the consumer space at a fraction of the energy costs (Apple SOC style versus energy inefficient hyperscaling) and used it as something to generate value by augmenting the capabilities of individual workers instead of trying to replace them wholesale. It only makes sense that it should have benefitted everyone considering this tech was built on shoving libraries worth of human achievement into a training pipeline (often without permission), right?
Nah. They profit more if we don’t own our own compute and everyone is encouraged to burn energy on treating the LLMs like all-knowing oracles instead of research tooling. They control the access to creations built on stolen knowledge. But hey, if everything else gets burned down in the process at least they come out on the other side rich and bailed out.
The jobs I have had over the last year have been heavily pushing it, yes.
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 don’t think so . Ideally, it will provide some increase of productivity if it will allow easily search for some information quickly ie faster and simply than googling or stackoverflow. But as for using natural language to write software here is good answer why it will not happen : https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html
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.
Explain how I’m not using my brain.
Also in what universe is 3 short paragraphs a “book”?
