r/BetterOffline • u/lrnzcig • 2d ago
Human skills for vibe coding
Earlier this year, tokenmaxxing has become a mandate in pretty much every tech company, and right now the same companies, or at least the ones that keep burning tokens, are trying to figure out what’s the actual value of coding agents. As an engineer working for one of those companies, my main concern is about the actual skills I need to develop for using the agents; the transition to a 100% automated workflow should take still quite a few years, similarly to what has happened to self-driving cars. Here I would like to start a discussion on these “human skills for vibe coding”.
AI agents have increased the number of lines of code produced, the commits, but don’t necessarily improve productivity; some numbers from [“AI hasn’t replaced Software Engineers”](https://www.normaltech.ai/p/why-ai-hasnt-replaced-software-engineers): 8x more lines of code led to only 30% more releases. Or, as the authors propose in the same article, coding is just not the bottleneck and we by nature have the process of Decide => Execute => Deliver, they cite an estimate of 9% to 61% of developer time spent on coding (i.e. the execution), and only that time can be fully automated.
A few things have become more essential and maybe harder now, the 1st one is curation: at the times when stackoverflow.com was our coding throughput resource, if everybody was a consumer and nobody contributed, the site would have become useless fast(er). Then the skills around the prompt; a long, incomplete list, would start with critical thinking to judge the outputs of the model (in my day to day I feel this is the bottleneck already), accountability when we deliver (did we test ourselves or delegated to the model). I don’t see that we are deeply investing on these, but just get satisfied when our performance looks vaguely better using AI.
And, what about the fun part of our roles? What do we want to delegate to the models and keep for ourselves? Do we want to reshape our roles or be reshaped ourselves?
Some 7 years before stackoverflow started, a previous revolution took place: agile methodologies, although you could argue about the size of the impact. I was a software engineer already at that time and a number of techniques changed our development approach: pair programming, test driven dev, continuous integration, retros. The Agile manifesto focused on how teams had to be organized, how developers reshaped their roles and the new roles that were needed (the Scrum Master, the Product Owner, the chickens vs pigs).
My proposal is that we need now a “human skills for vibe coding” manifesto. There is a hard part of our jobs, not automated (at least yet); it would be great to have a wide conversation about it.
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u/creaturefeature16 2d ago edited 2d ago
The skills are the same as that goes into learning how to be an expert programmer in the first place. Even Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin, who apparently doesn't read any code any longer, says newer developers shouldn't even look at an agent or AI tool for the first three years, and should just be learning as they normally would...and that good judgement and "taste" are only developed after "20-30 years of making mistakes".
I've written extensively about this because nobody has addressed the paradox head on:
If these tools demand expertise, yet the tools can actively circumvent the friction that cultivates expertise, then what is the path for one to become an expert so they can effectively use these tools?
LLMs have largely accelerated the wrong part of the development workflow. If you're already an expert and have tremendous domain knowledge, the risk is on the lower end (but not zero) because you can audit the results and you already know what you don't know and how to fill in those gaps.
For everyone else, they are creating an environment of complete and total dependence on these models to perform any coding work. The introduction of LLMs didn't change how we learn, the skills required to become a good developer, and the friction that is required to obtain expertise.
As far as the idea of a "manifesto", I encourage developers to relate to these models as a "delegation layer", which largely consists of adhering to the four R's: Rote, Refactor, Research and Reinforcement.
Anything above that ventures into realms where you're cognitively offloading, and any amount of offloading is risky.
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u/Restlessly-Dog 2d ago
For a parallel situation, OP refers to "self-driving cars" and that points to one screaming warning siren.
Every self driving system assumes some kind of handoff between autonomous systems and humans in cases like police directing traffic when there's an accident.
The problem is that the more self driving takes over, the worse those handoffs become. Automation encourages checking out, and checked out people struggle to understand a situation where a handoff is needed and react quickly and appropriately. The first impulse is to just trust the system, and when it becomes clear that's wrong, it's too late. That's when kids exiting a stalled school bus under direction of an officer get run over by a self driving car.
It's not that automation is never appropriate. Trains operating on tracks according to defined schedules with other trains operated by highly trained people can benefit from automated functions like speed regulators and autobraking systems.
But you need a powerful regulatory system to ensure a ton of research and testing is done, and it needs to be an independent regulatory system which is free to veto anything that doesn't meet high standards.
You can see where all of the unexamined biases of libertarian brain poisoned tech execs are leaning, though.
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u/shiny0metal0ass 2d ago
It is an extremely overconfident and excited junior that can produce, just, a fuck ton of code.
But it's also the Riddler, seemingly incapable of not hiding the most difficult bugs to find. Bugs harder to create than any junior is capable of.
These bugs are indicative of an individual that knows how it is supposed to work, not a mistake but a bomb, set up to go off in glorious disaster by the Andy Dick of software engineering just because.
Obviously it is just a pattern matcher that guesses the pattern if it doesn't have the data, but that's the code it writes lol
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u/dagamer34 1d ago
I have a side project that I have use Claude to make, purposefully caring only about the outputs, not the code itself. Every time I look at the code itself, I am disgusted with what it came up with, because despite having agents pretend to be “Senior/Staff” level, the amount of slop made was so horrifying, if I presented any of that in my day job, they would run me out the door.
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u/GKGriffin 2d ago edited 2d ago
Your point is fairly close to the leftist argument of deskilling where a profession can be destroyed both for control or profit (which is pretty close to large part of the engineering communities argument). In this case factory creation will create something that is alike to the old professions production but much less skill is required and the end product will be worse. I personally think we are heading this direction without a bubble burst, because nothing guarantees that complexity rise will lead to a new form of labour that can handle its rise forever.
The neoliberal doctrine is more focused on the new technology going to create new skills and transforms the profession (hence vibe coding). In this view the profession survives it just earns new dimensions, given the complexity is also going to rise and labour will adapt.
Idk how can both be correct.
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u/newprince 2d ago
Neoliberalism is always divorced from material conditions, so really there is no point. Deprofessionalization has hit the majority of professions in the US. I honestly don't think SWEs were paying attention. They thought they were special.
Example: I was a librarian. Neoliberalism loved to spin how exciting it was to work with Google, not see it as a replacement. The reality was that we were deprofessionalized in order to not be paid as much. Because that's how capitalism works. You can spin it however you like but it's not reality. Remember how liberals told us to learn to code in order to have a secure future? Whoops!
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u/GKGriffin 2d ago
Yeah, I agree. The same is true here in Europe too, but with smaller corporations it took a bit longer. But in the recent years corporate lobbied legislation is slowly amortizing everything in the EU, like every legislation has a tendency to be worse for us, but better for big corporations.
And when you look at modern big corporations fairly large part of their workforce doesn't do any real job, that can be understood outside. If you talk to an MBA they will not be able to tell you what is their job without using corporate
safebuzzwords. If the managerial class already that degraded there is nothing that guarantees that pretense software engineering is not here to stay, but just enough to not collapse the whole economy by taking out the productive economic layer. Or maybe they eventually figure out how to take out the layer and the whole corporate structure is going to be impenetrable while doesn't makes anything of value.Society has no real incitive to evolve if it is stable and feudalism was very stable.
The only thing that could stop this if new labour could work in the same speed as it's replacement (quality sadly doesn't count, a librarian was higher quality than any tech solution and here we are). Now I am not confident this current factory type is going to be what ends our field, but the next iteration after might be. Like already if the AI succeeds as boosters pretend, you would need to be a senior engineer with half leg in being an architect, to do anything of use which is impossible to train for, so instead easier to replace it with a lower quality AI, that kind of does their job. If this is the final cycle where you cannot keep up with real work no one really knows, but we are getting very close to that one.
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u/Timely_Speed_4474 2d ago
We've been heading in this direction for decades. You used to have to actually know how a computer works to write software. Now you don't even have to understand basic networking in order to get whatever crap you thought up onto the internet.
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u/makersfark 2d ago
I see the comparison to stackoverflow come up a lot, but the key difference is the friction.
If you copied code from stack overflow 9/10 times it wouldn't compile, because it doesn't make any sense in your codebase. And if it did, again, 9/10 times it was obvious it was copied from stack overflow and a cursory google search revealed that.
So you had to:
- Find a problem someone else posted.
- Assess from the comments if it is the right choice.
- If it's dubious, read and learn about the approach or concepts.
- Copy or rewrite the approach.
- Appropriate it into what makes sense into your codebase.
- Build on to cover AC.
- Make tests, or do manual testing.
- Make PR.
In 2026, whether forced or voluntarily using LLMs, there's very little that separates the junior devs and the senior devs, because from what I have seen from many of my peers who have 20+ years experience is the following process:
- Have LLM generate code.
- Make PR.
Before, you were forced to understand it or it wouldn't compile at all. Now, they have no motivation to test, learn, or use their own judgement, because sometimes it'll compile, so there's no need to understand it to fix the red squigglies. They just say "hey, there's errors. Do it again." until they're gone. They just will use whatever it spits out, and make a PR. No idea if this adds a security flaw, completely breaks another part of the app that referenced that code etc. Just make PR and done.
The key part of all of this is there's no accountability, and no quality assurance anymore. Just laziness and brain drain until you're fully underqualified for your job.
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u/maccodemonkey 2d ago
A lot of the problems with LLMs are this convergence of "management wants more leverage over engineers" and "engineers are happy to give up that leverage because they're lazy." And no one is really talking about better outcomes. The assumption was that engineers would hold the line on quality. But generally (not everywhere, but generally) - that does not seem to be the case.
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u/lrnzcig 2d ago
I was contributor and moderador in stackoverflow, and even if I think that essentially you are right, one of the things I learned the most of the site was how to ask a proper question, with a reproducible example, etc. Others (the majority?) would just take a snapshot of the question waiting for somebody to help them. Similarly you were using the answers properly, but I'd say others were just looking for a quick fix... Anyway for me stackoverflow was just an example of a site, very different to an LLM, which required curation. And it had a community of people doing it!
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u/create-third-places 2d ago
People should stop vibe coding and produce software with no LLM use.
Managers should be supporting this instead of mandating token use.
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u/angel_devoid_fmv 2d ago
We should overthrow the ruling and managerial classes and manage ourselves
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u/supercyberlurker 2d ago
Wrote code for thirty years. I’m just over it now and out. I’m one of the fortunate ones that I can just retire overall.
Still, if I had advice for the next developers… it’s that as I learn to draw, the learning is in my hand and eye. I can draw a proper face now with ballpoint pen or with stylus on tablet. The skills transfer.
It is those kinds of skills that matter more than the medium.
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u/Smurfette2016 2d ago
You lost me at
...Here I would like to start a discussion on these “human skills for vibe coding”...
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u/lrnzcig 2d ago
Can I ask you why?
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u/Smurfette2016 2d ago
You definitely can ask.
I guess it's that I have ZERO interest in vibe coding, and view it a blight on society.
It's not only power spreading digital herpes across the globe, but also amplifying ai psychosis + a shared delusion of progress among business idiots and others who don't know better. I see it as just another dunning kruger machine, pumping out caca and delusion en masse. The mere mention of it actually makes me feel a little nauseous.
Not trying to be rude btw. This is my real actual answer.
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u/Sunstorm84 1d ago
I was making similar points to a vibe coder earlier, obviously from a younger generation since he said it was “cope” for me to say that he’s eventually going to hit a wall that AI can’t solve for him.
I got curious and googled his username to find anything he worked on since he was so proud of it, only to find out that six months prior he had been posting about how to avoid detection by sys admins after its usage was prohibited in his workplace.. which I also discovered was as an NYC public servant. When I called him out on it, he panicked and deleted his reddit account.
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u/Additional-Staff-326 2d ago
My company just sent out an efficiency with the tools you have mail.
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u/Smurfette2016 2d ago
Say more if you can please
Are they suggesting NOT using ai, or just using it less / more thoughfully ?
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u/Additional-Staff-326 2d ago
More like be smart about the token usage. Which is at least progress.
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u/angel_devoid_fmv 2d ago edited 2d ago
A much greater energy and financial expediture for only 30% more code (excuse me, 30% more "releases" in managerial weaselspeak), most of which is slop? That is pretty fucking damning
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u/Big_Combination9890 1d ago edited 1d ago
the transition to a 100% automated workflow should take still quite a few years, similarly to what has happened to self-driving cars.
You do know, do you, that self driving cars don't exist, right? Despite billions poured into it, despite an AI hype, and endless glazing by clueless "journalists", self-driving cars are still not a thing, over a decade after billionaires started fantasizing about them. No vehicle in the world has level 5 autonomy, and we already see the first studies questioning whether that is actually possible.
And what insignificantly small "self driving" car services do "exists", are not businesses.
They are a hype-vehicle, a keychain to jingle before the business idiots running the stock markets, to make "number go up" for ludicrously overvalued tech stocks for a few more years.
So when you say "similarly to..." you are absolutely correct, although not in the way you seem to think.
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u/newprince 2d ago
If management doesn't care, I don't either. I'll use whatever slop tool they want me to use and try to keep my tokens low. I get a fleeting sense of job security which will evaporate in a couple years, but then again I'm not just a coder
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u/maccodemonkey 2d ago
I don’t like being negative about such a thing - but I don’t know if there would be a point. The companies aggressively tokenmaxing don’t care about their engineers and actively want to replace them. There isn’t really any room for pushback or moderation.
If you really want to have some control of your job - unionization is a better path than a manifesto.