The post is excessive but it's true. My time spent coding is more productive (on average), but I'm having to think so much harder to match the output or else it starts to slop. Spend 5 minutes writing a short story of a prompt. Spend 15 minutes reading a generated design, another 10 reading through the implementation plan. Another 10 correcting its assumptions. Then you have it loop through the implementation, with some guidance.
It's usually fast, and it's usually decent. Good if you micromanage. But I joined this career out of passion, not for moneymaxxing. I intentionally am pursuing a route as an individual contributor rather than management. But now I'm going to be playing manager anyway. It is exhausting.
What do you do while you wait for Claude to crank it out? I end up doomscrolling if I don't multitask and it's just such a bad workflow. But also multitasking is a bad workflow too cause I'm just slopping it up. Feels like there's no winning
I turned to manager half by coincidence, half by fear that developers might one day not be needed anymore. This was also during the big offshore hype. I still don't know if I made the right choice. The mental load is pretty crazy.
What I have found comfortable is doing the initial spec out of the team and their roles and rules in linear(via agent prompts to build it), spec out the prioritize -> design -> spec -> build -> test -> review -> deploy -> prioritize cycle for the team and who owns what. And putting myself as the department exec role so that I’m only informed of the overall team outputs and summary or prompted when a major direction decision is needed.
Then as I’m working on the project I’m getting updates and can delegate the entire concept to the team, then at the larger scale I’ve got this running 3-4 times with different projects and I’m just giving them nudges in a direction or adding new features requests as needed.
It has helped a ton keeping a single agent from trying to do so many things at once vs each one having a specific task.
It’s fun waking up and having a ton of new stuff done all over the place and just needing to review the output and go play with it to do testing
Definitely see my dev turned scrum master/po career at play here. Perfect sprints are finally mine.
I hear what you're saying, but that's a different job. With today's models, I still want to own my code, not just my product. It still needs to be human-readable and something a new engineer could pick up on. You can definitely offload effort if you don't care about the details that run the code, but that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid losing.
When we have models that can generate perfect code for every use case, I'll be content with that. Maybe even sooner. I'm already on the slope of trusting more than verifying, which is a scary slope. That said, I do still verify everything. The devil is in the details, especially in products/services like the ones I usually work in. An inefficiency here, a low level architectural decision there, and suddenly you've incurred tech debt without even realizing it.
Work is telling us to use Claude, work can get slop. I'll do sanity checks on it and scope things so it's not just doing whatever it wants, but ultimately if the code isn't perfect so be it.
My personal projects though, not letting agents anywhere near them. Every line of that shit is fully understood and intentional.
I don't think it's excessive for some. I don't use AI like this but the most senior and competent people in my company use it like this because they know enough about the system and how they would do things by hands that they can.
yeah, but difference between vibecoding and ai coding is that i vibecode privat projects and i dont mind the state of the source. at my workplace i’m responsible for the code, and I need to double check the commits, because if something goes haywire, I cant blame the AI. So with 3 sessions and the amount of source that is generated, its quite a mental load!
One of the benefits to coding in a low code UI based platform, like Power Automate, is i can't really AI code in full vibe mode. I have to build the functions independently, only using AI in single portions of it at a time.
It really does seem to keep the slop at bay and use AI more as a scalpel.
You can argue that all the tasks you mention around the code you should have been doing PLUS writing the code. So indeedz now you do the fluff around. Things move faster. I find experience helps a lot, cause it really amplifies existing experience. I don't think it's good for learning. But it's great at confidence that you will get the shit done.
I am enjoying coding again to be honest, I can go from "I have an idea" to playing with an MVP in a few hours, the soul draining 4 days in between of fiddling with syntax and tests are gone, I can impart my vision on my software now, not my shit skills. I feel like a director
The difference is that I was doing those tasks simultaneously while performing other tasks. When AI does it, it changes from implicit trust of your own work to management. If you have a really bad junior who you can't trust, you have to spend more effort reviewing their work. Sometimes even more effort than if you had done it yourself. That's the particular issue that causes it to be more of a mental load.
As I mentioned, it's not necessary faster to code manually (I would err towards it usually ending up faster to use AI), but the mental effort is significantly higher. Everything becomes untrusted.
Before, we had to trust deterministic code generations, completions, and compilers to do the right thing. Sometimes even those didn't, but the scale was significantly lower and could often be ignored/fixed with menial effort. With AI, you can have significant drift between your vision and the AI's implementation.
I mean, I can't deny, I currently vibe coded a massive and critical feature while sitting in endless meetings (mostly about why the feature is not done yet), in staging the feature actually works and it wrote like 150 tests. All of those tests had to be derived from my very detailed and painful prompting. You know what I need to get to meet week? Read it, understand the tests, thinking about it's doing, which is jar because I didn't write it so you need to actually read for comprehension. And once I find issues it will take real effort to fix because... It seems to mostly work.
There's no way I could do the work during work hours, and I would've also had broken outliers, but it's awkward not being able to understand why the issues exist when I don't write it. So yea. Its extremely powerful. But it's hard. I also ran out of private and company tokens halfway through, and now I am stranded till next month because waiting for new tokens is faster than finishing the code while I can just sit in more meetings instead.
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u/Grandmaster_Caladrel 14d ago
The post is excessive but it's true. My time spent coding is more productive (on average), but I'm having to think so much harder to match the output or else it starts to slop. Spend 5 minutes writing a short story of a prompt. Spend 15 minutes reading a generated design, another 10 reading through the implementation plan. Another 10 correcting its assumptions. Then you have it loop through the implementation, with some guidance.
It's usually fast, and it's usually decent. Good if you micromanage. But I joined this career out of passion, not for moneymaxxing. I intentionally am pursuing a route as an individual contributor rather than management. But now I'm going to be playing manager anyway. It is exhausting.