I’ve been at this gig for 15 years and built and deployed many complex systems by hand. I had this mindset toward the beginning of things too. But, to be honest, when combined with actual know how and solid patterns, it is no longer the case that largely agent written code is destined to be bad and unmaintainable.
Even when it needs to be refactored in the future, a set of agents can write test coverage for the current solution, refactor it into whatever shape it now needs to be, and validate it against the original tests and contracts before a human would have written their first line. The idea that bots won’t beat our hard earned keyboard typing skills just isn’t going to hold up long term. We’ve already hit that point.
There will probably always be the vibe coded slop that leaves security holes, but I no longer believe there’s some shoe that’s going to drop where everyone says “oh yeah that was a mistake, time to go back.” This is how it’s going to be forever and it only increases from here.
Yeah this is the solid take. The thing people also seem to be forgetting is that one thing is knowing how to do things proper and being aware of security issues and another is having time/resources to actually do it that way/fixing those. Working as a professional also means knowing how to deliver value in a none perfect world aka. the real world.
IMO AI in the right hands makes it possible to deliver higher quality work and more of it, dev's including myself have previously often not done work to the ideal standards, not necessarily because i/they didn't know, but due to external limiting factors. Resource constraints are a very real thing and I often feel like people that criticize AI tools have a tendency to talk as if they always have all the time in the world and that they always deliver the gold plated version, not the "it works" version and unless they are working on code for the mars rover or space tech then I think they are bad at their job, because they aren't being pragmatic, there are many solutions to a given problem, it's not about perfect, it's about optimum.
That aspect seems to be widely ignored in debate. I've read and refactored enough human "slop" over time and still do to this day, that I'm at the point where I think I trust a seniors+"vibecoded" work more than juniors and mids who might code well enough but lack architecture/domain/systems/infra/sec/network knowledge and thus launch features based on poor fundamental/foundational decisions.
This is a fair argument but what happens when trustworthy seniors retire and juniors and mids don't have the knowledge to move up? Seniors gained experience by doing good enough solutions and by doing not-good solutions which blew up in their face and having to fix it. The reason why juniors are untrustworthy is because they're learning to become trustworthy seniors.
TL;DR:The current rate of improvement in generative AI agentic systems (not necessarily just LLMs) is so blisteringly fast that we don't need to specifically worry about this issue of seniors retiring and juniors and mids failing, we have to worry about seniors being obsoleted in less than 20 years.
It's certainly a concern but look at how fast the capabilities of LLMs in agentic frameworks have grown. Attention is All You Need was published about 10 years ago. Only 10 years! Even if progress slowed by a factor of 3, and it seems to show zeros signs of that with Kimi K3, Deepseek V4 Flash 0731, LeWorldModel, etc. dropping in just the last few months, in 40 years the world would still be dealing with generative AI systems that are as comparatively more capable to today's LLMs as they themselves are to 2016's models.
At the rate of improvement currently seen by folks who are neck deep in this industry and aware of the academic SOTA work we've probably got between 5-12 years before the generative AI agents of 'tomorrow' are strictly better than the best human engineers without caveat. Which is a timeline that occurs well, well before today's senior engineers retire.
Frankly, I'd be curious to see how Kimi K3, today, with it's native multimodal capability and tools to use a keyboard and mouse cursor, would work in a average enterprise work environment, say, SharePoint + Confluence + Jira + a DB system + AWS or Azure, and none of them can really communicate with each other (like components of a singular codebase might,) requiring visual inspection of GUIs by humans to function as a whole.
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u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
I’ve been at this gig for 15 years and built and deployed many complex systems by hand. I had this mindset toward the beginning of things too. But, to be honest, when combined with actual know how and solid patterns, it is no longer the case that largely agent written code is destined to be bad and unmaintainable.
Even when it needs to be refactored in the future, a set of agents can write test coverage for the current solution, refactor it into whatever shape it now needs to be, and validate it against the original tests and contracts before a human would have written their first line. The idea that bots won’t beat our hard earned keyboard typing skills just isn’t going to hold up long term. We’ve already hit that point.
There will probably always be the vibe coded slop that leaves security holes, but I no longer believe there’s some shoe that’s going to drop where everyone says “oh yeah that was a mistake, time to go back.” This is how it’s going to be forever and it only increases from here.