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.
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.
“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
This is an interesting take. Thanks for sharing. I think this is a part of why many people avoid proprietary and corporate software.
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.
The problem with it is that it’s destroying the motivation of maintainers and causing projects to become closed to new contributors due to people not respecting contribution guidelines with agentic LLMs. It’s not necessarily destroying quality for those that have standards, but it is destroying the community.
That’s a good point. At the moment, I don’t have solutions besides not using the major Macroslop sourceforge, because they are heavily promoting the use of AI and knowing how they operate, it’s only going to get worse. Codeberg, Gitlab, Radicle, etc. might be temporarily safe until federation is implemented and another solution will have to be found.
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.
There’s nothing to prevent you from writing code in an IDE while the torment nexus TUI churns out whatever monster misfeature request was waiting for you in your Jira queue this morning.
In fact I’d recommend doing the code writing part. It helps, even if it increasingly becomes a rounding error in your overall output.
It’s bleak as shit right now. God why couldn’t this have waited until after my retirement.
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.
Programming was never enjoyable to me.
Making things is. LLMs allow you to be extremely pragmatic and enjoy making things or troubleshooting things without tedious line by line nature.
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.
I do enjoy programming, but I prefer “getting stuff done”. While I enjoy programming, I’d rather just get it done and move on. I like the results of having programmed.
Productivity is my problem, because I build stuff for myself, not just for my boss.
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.
people who can suddenly “”“make”“” things like minecraft mods are also a part of those celebrating, though i assume they’re a lot less vocal about it
and god i wish that was all it was used for
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The jobs I have had over the last year have been heavily pushing it, yes.
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…
This comment condensed all the thoughts and emotions of an entire episode of Black Mirror into a few paragraphs
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.
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.
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.
Those engineers are bad
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.
There are two things we measure inadequately with junior/senior. There are people who are highly skilled and have aptitude and passion for engineering - they are junior for lack of experience, but will be senior in good time.
Then there are people who are simply shit, who probably call themselves “coders”, who are proud of being self-taught by hacking out Javascript or got a vocational qualification from a Poly. They will remain junior forever (unless they work in outsourcing, in which case they’ll be billed as senior devs if they can bluff their way through for 6 months.)
The latter are fucked, the former will be fine; I suspect we’re going back to a world as it was 30 or 40 years ago though, where the quality of your degree is far more important and the number of vacancies far lower. I rather hope the death of outsourcing will also finally mean an end to the ridiculous job-title/expertise inflation that sector has wrought upon the industry.
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.
I’m still designing and writing all code by hand. I don’t know that any of my coworkers are and know that many definitely are not. Our company does have copilot reviews built into CI and, at least for now, requires human review as well.
The problem with cast coding a bunch of vibe coded apps is you have to maintain the vibe coded apps.
As a developer of over two decades, ive seen ai aka llms good at:
- Creating small MVPs to prove something is possible as software
- Stealing and using other peoples code to make said apps.
- Quick very small directed scripts.
- Making up funny random shit. Such as aidungeon.
- Using up ram
And its mediocre at a lot of things.
And straight up bad at other things such as cooking and instructions that need to be followed to the letter.
