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.
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.
The price is also a big factor. They’re currently taking big losses, so your AI usage is being subsidized by investors. Eventually they’ll want a return on that investment, so the price is going to go up. Way up.
We don’t know yet whether AI is actually cost effective over just having a developer write the code. Or maybe it’ll be cost effective to use something on the level of Haiku for simpler stuff, and a human developer does the more complicated stuff.
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.
I don’t think it will take a societal collapse to stop the use of these tools. Just someone at your company running a cost benefit analysis on it after the AI companies start charging the full price.
I was lucky to upgrade my GPU before the price increases, but the open weight models are quite alright for the moderate stuff, and electricity is much cheaper than the cloud token costs at the moment. So, unless HW prices will be forever high and that bleeds into the 2nd hand market too, I don’t think there will be at least some economical viability.
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.
In the future there will be a huge job market for un-vibing code bases, I guarantee it
My hunch as well. I’m not certain though. And I’m not going to be miserable for an unspecified number of years waiting for the shit to hit the fan.
What, future. There’s already plenty of “vibe code cleanup specialist” job postings.
Sounds like a burnout speedrun, imo.
Almost everyone in the industry worth their weight is using LLMs now. Top tier models create really solid code nowadays.
Almost everyone in the industry worth their weight is using LLMs now. Top tier models create really solid code nowadays.
This is not my experience. What worries me, is that I see posts like this all across the internet:
- All the good programmers are using LLMs. If you are not using agents for coding, you’re a bad programmer.
- Frontier LLMs are wonderful. You are just using the wrong model.
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:
- Gemini recommended a Kubernetes service to me (nice choice).
- The Helm config it gave had big problems. Settings were hallucinated and it used a feature that did not exist.
- After a day of doubling down on errors, I read a Github issue that said the Helm chart did not support the feature I needed.
- On Friday, I wrote my own Helm chart for the program from scratch. Thankfully, this is a skill that I have not lost. Its small, simple and I understand it.
- Total score this week: 1 day lost to AI.
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?
Nah but that is a straw man argument you just brought up to argue against. That’s not very nice of you in a good faith argument.
I think the engineering part is misleading. If we’d built bridges like we build software. I’ve seen my fair share of legacy code in companies and it is far from what people think of it seems. Actually, that would be critique I have of LLMs. That they copy the style of a project, even if it is horrible.
That said, good models absolutely are helping with real world problems and Lemmy claims it’s literally the spawn of Satan. It’s a bit silly over a tool that has it’s uses. The effects on ram prices and datacenters in general leave plenty of room for us to bicker over, but it’s undeniably a good tool for both debugging and some coding.
How is saying “Software engineering has always been bad. People just copy pasted stack overflow.” a good faith argument? Is hyperbole a good faith argument? “Honey, you never put the dishes into the washer the correct way, you just copy different styles from youtube.” Is that good faith? Don’t try and gaslight me.
If you want to have a good faith argument, we can do that.
I think the engineering part is misleading. If we’d built bridges like we build software. I’ve seen my fair share of legacy code in companies and it is far from what people think of it seems. Actually, that would be critique I have of LLMs. That they copy the style of a project, even if it is horrible.
Sure, actual engineers that have to pass a state exam in order to be called engineer probably do smirk at the term “software engineer”, and yes, code that comes out of companies is often hastily slapped together to achieve the goal being first to market, delivering something that works, not properly thought out to be future safe, and so on. But there is quite a different between a code-base written by juniors in the language or field and seniors in the language or field.
Simply waving away those differences and reducing it to “copy pasted stack overflow” which is now automated, while obviously hyperbole, is IMO pretty far from reality.
That they copy the style of a project, even if it is horrible.
My experience has not been that way. LLMs have so far introduced whichever style of code they were trained on, unless given rules and forcefully linted into adopting a better style. But there is only so much a linter can do.
That said, good models absolutely are helping with real world problems and Lemmy claims it’s literally the spawn of Satan.
I agree, LLMs have their place. But there are worlds between “LLMs = never”, “LLMs sometimes” and “my job consists of prompting AI”. Maybe we do agree, but your initial message was, to me, unnecessary hyperbole, which prompted my reaction.
Sure thing, it just irks me that Lemmy overall is so negative. It’s basically the opposite of hacker news around here. Having looked at models and what they can do in recent months has been overall positive. Today I used it to write me a firmware for some Chinese hardware I had lying around that had little to no documentation and now does what I want it to do. There’s no harm in that.
Which models did you use so far?
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.
My software dev friend was told to use Claude to speed up his code writing. He finds it great but it requires review.
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.
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.
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.
I have a co-worker that worked on a system with Kafka and some RDF inspired schema for the messages. He found a documentation page for an app using it telling bullshit about it and it is quite obvious made by AI without review. Even the first sentence was idiotic and wrong, so useless even for another LLM.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
“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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This comment condensed all the thoughts and emotions of an entire episode of Black Mirror into a few paragraphs
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.
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.
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.
Ah the old “LLMs are just a new layer of abstraction” argument. No they aren’t, and won’t be any time soon.
You mean that “write this service make no mistakes” executed with a LLM-as-a-service where the underlying model updates every week and the model itself is deprecated in 8 months isn’t a good idea for a source code representation?
Nah, it definitely is. It’s called job security.
On the first half, that’s not how it’s done; the input is a much more detailed description of design and architecture coupled with TDD.
On the second half - I happen to agree, that’s why I think the OpenAI/Anthropic business models are doomed to fail. But that’s where locally deployed models become key - predictable output.
They don’t need to be better than the best programmer in the world to change how 90% of code is written, they just need to be better than a junior dev from Timbuctoo. And feasably-deployable open models crossed that bar around Q1 this year and are only getting better (Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is another huge leap forward.) We may not be quite there yet, but the destination is now inevitable; adapt or find a new career.
On the first half, that’s not how it’s done; the input is a much more detailed description of design and architecture coupled with TDD.
Yes, I have these coworkers too. I’ve seen what they look like, and it doesn’t change my point.
But that’s where locally deployed models become key - predictable output.
Local controlled models help, yes. That isn’t what business do, though. And even for local models, the models are still stochastic as fuck. Maybe that changes in the future, in which case I’d reconsider that view (though natural language is still a terrible interface for telling a computer precisely what to do).
We may not be quite there yet, but the destination is now inevitable; adapt or find a new career.
How many years has it been now? Mythos was the end of the world, Fable had to be locked down by the US government, Astra is going to cause humanity to go extinct, and yet here we still are today with vibecoded, mass-produced slop.
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.
Well said!
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.
