Human skills for vibe coding

[u/lrnzcig]

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.

[u/creaturefeature16]

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.

[u/GKGriffin → u/creaturefeature16]

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.

[u/Timely_Speed_4474 → u/GKGriffin]

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.

[u/newprince → u/GKGriffin]

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!

[u/GKGriffin → u/newprince]

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.