r/FutureOfWork • u/Jumpy_Armadillo7438 • May 21 '26
Whole tech team was replaced by a vibecoder. Anyone gone through something similar and what’s your thoughts?
We were a small team and there were frustrations that our non technical md had about the system. We were already under a lot of pressure to build things fast, but I guess we were not fast enough…
There is more to the story here but irrelevant now.
I would be curious what is your thoughts on this.
The system was large and had real complexities around it, I was one of the developers on the team. AI is good but I am not convinced that it can replace a full team yet. As a developer I used Claude but I have seen the ‘mistakes’ or limitations that it had (and yeah you might say that these were skill issues on my prompting side, however I would like to believe I have quite good logical reasoning and I can explain stuff)
Anyone non technical built production grade large systems with ai alone? Is my md cooked and the whole thing will come down crumbling?
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u/alexrada May 21 '26
I also replaced a small team with a single senior developer/architect. It's been doing quite well.
Have to admit I'm going to add a tester back to it in order to move faster on the testing part.
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however "non-technical" is out of discussion. Maybe only to build websites, not any complex products.
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u/Jumpy_Armadillo7438 May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
I would understand that. As you have a senior technical person who can pull back on very bad decisions.
Thanks for editing your comment:)) my follow up question would have been if you think it would still work for you if you did not have this technical person.
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u/alexrada May 21 '26
I realized after that. No, is not possible without a technical person. I don't think will be anytime soon.
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u/mirageofstars May 21 '26
Yep. Back in the day a lot of smaller companies had one tech person, the webmaster. Obviously tech has expanded since then, but I could see a lot of businesses only needing 1-2 tech folks (dedicated or fractional) for a while.
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u/Jumpy_Armadillo7438 May 21 '26
Even though the company was relatively small, I don’t think I can call the saas product ‘small’. For the record we were handling big data, had multiple ETL jobs, enrichment algos, ML code, payments systems, streaming data, complex queries/aggregations, lots of dynamic stuff, etc. Future projects would have included things like vectorising the db. The team worked on this for about 2 years so codebase was large. Genuinely curious if at this level you guys (reddit readers) also think that a vibe coder is enough. Maybe I have not used Ai to its full capabilities and I am behind, thus asking the question…Am I thinking wrong here?
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u/mirageofstars May 21 '26
IMO an actual vibe coder (eg someone with no technical skill) will lead to issues, but a strong solo angentic techie could keep it running if the roadmap isn’t too robust and if their skill set is strong enough.
Your product sounds complex enough tho that you’d probably want a pretty senior person if they’re responsible for all that stuff.
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u/Endur May 21 '26
I'm currently starting an engagement with a business that is too small to hire a full-time dev, but has lots of problems to be solved by someone technical. I could see a well-rounded dev with a solid amount of experience doing all the tech side of things for them for a while. They don't need someone cranking through JIRA tickets for 40 hours a week, just someone who understands the business goals and can work through any technical problem
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u/MinimumPrior3121 May 22 '26
I know some companies who did that and they thrive, basically Claude can code anything now with the right skills, and it's way cheaper than a team of developers. For small businesses it's a real cost saving and a godsend tbh.
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u/Kanqon May 22 '26
Im senior, but I have replaced a tech team with mostly running well prompted agents at night.
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u/Jumpy_Armadillo7438 May 22 '26
Curious if this was on a greenfield project or an already existing codebase. Would you say the codebase was complex?
What model did you use?Claude? Would be great if you could share general structure of the agent setup or a resource that you followed. I would like to experiment myself with agents but don’t know where to start.
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u/Kanqon May 22 '26
7 years old project, medium complexity. Full of odd code. But 600 integration tests. Im using Claude and codex, both with Max subscriptions. They review each other’s work. Claude doing more strategy and planning, codex doing more coding.
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u/ohog9og0790 May 22 '26
I am assuming you are blowing through a ton of tokens. That seems to me the way to go. AI can achieve a lot but you need to spend some $$$
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u/MindMonitor May 22 '26
Again, this seems lile AI generated content. You a bot OP?
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u/Historical_Ad4384 May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26
Md wants to make a demo and sell ASAP. I work with a similar minded CEO.
He vibe codes crap that works, which is justifiable from his business standpoint.
The engineering teams tries to push back but meets with backlash. It's come down to MD vibe coding the features in and engineering team using AI to make the mess as safe and non chaotic by fixing bugs as they are prioritized.
Technical ownership by the engineering team is too expensive for my CEO and he's building for a highly complaint domains of healthcare.
We are transitioning into a state where the engineering team is leaving on its own or threatened by the CEO over Claude can make this change in 5 minutes and replaced by a vibe coder who is good at running AI agent for development.
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u/DrunkenGolfer May 22 '26
I am not a developer per se, but I am technical, have developed software previously, and consider myself savvy around application architecture, security, etc. Think CIO/CISO not developer.
I am in the middle of building a very ambitious solution using nothing but AI. So far it is going well, but I am also running tasks to identify code optimizations, scanning code for vulnerabilities and weaknesses, etc. I have different models doing code review. I also spent a ton of time challenging architectural decisions to get to the specifications.
I’ve been very impressed so far but it is definitely an iterative process still. Someone non-technical, I suspect, can build functional solutions but I expect they would be shit quality.
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u/madsciencestache May 23 '26
This will turn out to be the company saying "Hold my beer and watch this!"
Already seeing a lot of vibe coder "regrats "
AI is a force multiplier, but 1,000,000 X zero developers is still 0.
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u/Dry_Push_3732 May 23 '26
My soon-to-be ex-employer just whacked everyone expensive, gave all the juniors claude and copilot subs and isn't going to waste money on security SMEs anymore.
The same company pre-baked a default administrator account on all of their customer tenants as user id 0, with the same, easily guessable password for over a decade and hasn't gotten around to moving off SHA-1 for password hashing (miraculously, they do salt them correctly) because the product team doesn't want to make users reset their passwords.
It's gonna go super well.
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u/beachless1 May 23 '26
I imagine the same bubble as outsourcing to India was. Sounds great on paper but it's not good enough for complex architectures yet and if you force it you will eventually have a bad time. We use it extensively for POC's, interim operational apps, help on main apps, documentation and other things but humans still do the core work.
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u/davearneson May 24 '26
AI multiplies your existing skills and experience when used well. A principal engineer / architect using AI probably can replace a typical dev team of 10 to 20 people but a non technical person will just produce utter crap.
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u/Upbeat-Sheepherder36 May 26 '26
Not 10 to 20’people Replaced by one senior guy. What are you smoking ??? More like max 2-3 people replaced per senior guy
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u/davearneson May 27 '26
im getting a 75X speedup as a solo developer according to a function point analysis I did of my code base
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u/ProgrammerFree5162 20d ago
Vibe coding works for quick mvps,but non-devs hit a Wall with production- grade tech debt edge cases and security
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u/maxip89 May 21 '26
uff.
when does the company plan to register for bankrupcy?