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.
No, vibe coding is what happens when a new technology spawns, and everyone is in a gold rush to find out what they can use it for.
LLM assisted software development is probably here to stay though. I’m also learning the ropes of this agentic stuff, where it works and where it falls flat as I always try to fully understand and take ownership of the code I put in my commits. At the end of the day, it needs to look like I coded it.
On an aside, I’m hopeful we can figure out an ethical way to do model training that respects licensing, such as only training on MIT licensed code. Such a rabbit hole the ethics are.
I read a geography meme book last week. Non-ai users have wrinklier brains. Don’t worry.
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.
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
Just don’t do it, if you don’t want. Noone can pull the plug on your will. Only you can.
I’m already branded as practicing the cardinal sin of resisting change. They can’t make me vibe code, but they can absolutely fire me. I’d rather leave on my own terms.
Not to fire you up… better leave yesterday. It got rather quiet due to LLM usage, but when the shit hit’s the fan who’s going to beg on their knees? The more you use it the more you also train it. Most people think they are using a product, but again they fooled everyone into becoming the product.
Almost everyone in the industry worth their weight is using LLMs now. Top tier models create really solid code nowadays.
My software dev friend was told to use Claude to speed up his code writing. He finds it great but it requires review.
I think I’ll use this answer to reflect. So first, vibe coding means, to me anyway, taking w/e the ai spits at you without checking/understanding. Aside from that, like okay, check the code send the PR. But anyway, at one point in my life, I thought, hey it would be great to go from writing code to reviewing code by others. I thought that would be a stepping stone for me. After a carefully thought, that’s what ai code gen is in the end. One of those careful what you wish for kind of thing.
I do think LLM is here to stay, one way or another. Might be like the next compiler like a comment suggested. I also do think that any software developer/engineer is stronger candidate with AI than one who rejects it.
Vibe coding means giving an LLM access to the entire repository and blindly accepting the very large pull requests it makes after you tell it what you want.
That is an insane way to do development and any company who does it will suffer.
What is becoming normal is AI assisted programming. The developer retains understanding of the codebase and uses an LLM to generate small boilerplate sections because it’s quicker than writing everything by hand.
Using LLMs to write code is perfectly acceptable as long as there is a human understands exactly what the code does. Do not give agency to the AI and you’ll be fine. Let it make decisions for you and you’ll be out of the job pretty quickly.
I write code. There is skill to being able to read documentation. I love tools like predictive IDE’s. Search engines augmented my ability to code with sites like stackoverflow. LLM’s are a continuation of that trend. Often the output is broad strokes that I need to refine. At my workplace, humans are required even with the tool improvements.
It’s not going away.
Everyone who complains about the quality of the code it produces is overlooking one important fact: 90% of the code developed by the software engineering profession is utter dogshit, pasted together by people whose understanding just about extends to typing in stackoverflow.com by banging their head against they keyboard.
LLMs are not replacing artisinal hand-crafted code developed by a skilled engineer from a top-10 university, it’s replacing the utter shite produced by the people with an NVQ from Timbuctoo Community College that actually powers the vast majority of websites and enterprise software.
And it’s fucking good at it.
Look, when I started my career I used to hand-write assembly code. I used to personally review the output of the Keil C51 compiler because its optimiser was objectively dogshit. Nobody is doing that any more - partly because the compilers are better than programmers at writing assembler these days, and partly because we have so much CPU and memory we don’t know what to do with, so who cares if they aren’t. Both apply to LLMs, and we will soom be at a stage where reviewing - or even caring - about the quality of LLM produced code is as anachronistic as thinking you need the check the compiler’s output. (TBF, Clang/LLVM for AVR still produces dogshit assembler, but that’s by the by.)
Just as assembler did before, high-level code is going to become just another intermediate representation that isn’t really important; what will matter are the prompts and context you give to the LLMs. And there’s still a hell of a lot of engineering skills that need to go into that.
Software Engineers - the real ones - have nothing to fear from LLMs, and in many ways it’s much more satisfying working with an LLM than a team of barely skilled “coders”. The barely skilled coders who wouldn’t know malloc from a semaphore though? They’re fucked.
God I have þoughts about your post, but I’m not typing all of it out on my stupid phone, so maybe if I remember when I’m at a computer þis comment will serve as a placeholder.
If you know what you’re doing and you know what good patterns look like then AI is a very good way to take some shortcuts and not have to write all the code yourself. It also keeps getting better. This is a super unpopular opinion on Lemmy, but I’ve been doing this job for 25 years and AI has only sped it up.
On the other end of vibe coding you have people who would never touch a compiler in their life if it wasn’t for AI, who are building practical, useful things in the real world. I think because Lemmy is so full of tech people that we often forget the tech serves larger purposes than just having nice code.
I think it’s also helpful to remember that short of an entire societal collapse we will never stop using these tools and they will only get better. The monolithic systems that are in place running the world are not going to change anytime soon. Even if we encounter a major correction of some sort these tools will only come back better and cheaper. You will never get everyone in the world to agree on regulation and at least one nation will march forward with progress unabated. You can hate the tech companies, the governments, the rich, the stupid, the right wing, the left wing, it doesn’t matter. We are locked on a course.
AI came at sort of a perfect time for me. I grew very tired of coding about, I don’t know, 5 or 10 years ago. No LLM in sight back then.
Now that I can do “coding” without the absolute bore of the process, I’m much happier. I find that I can accomplish projects that I have been dreaming about for decades.
Models keep getting better and cheaper. I can now drive the pretty capable Deepseek v4.1 flash pretty much 24h a day on my projects while spending something like 20 euros per month.
