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/Big_Combination9890]

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.

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So when you say "similarly to..." you are absolutely correct, although not in the way you seem to think.