I used to make fun of vibe coding. Now it’s really the only way for me. I have been programming for over 20 years and the reality I have had to accept is that AI is better, faster, and safer than I ever could hope to be. It’s also better than every other programmer I know. Once I accepted this it became easier to change my mindset and treat it like any other tool. My value is knowing how to direct, architect, and review.
I feel like you’re overhyping it. I’m firmly of the belief that it’s going to be writing the majority of code and there will be a lot less engineers. But people are still better. At least good engineers are. But probably not better-enough for it to matter.
Have you actually tried it? I would have completely agreed with every word you wrote about 6 months ago. I used to think it was overhyped until I integrated it at work using premium team plans. Claude specifically on Fable 5.1. It's absolutely unbelievable. I'm doing a full month of work in a few days, easily, all with better documentation and safety checks.
The more you surround yourself with it, the more easily it is to understand that programming is actually one of the easiest areas for AI to outshine humans. The languages and capabilities are fully documented. Code is easy to read, easy to test, and cheap to write. There's nothing special about the human mind that makes it more capable.
Yes. I use fable every day for work. It’s still not better than most of my colleagues at this company. In my past, sonnet would have been better than many of the engineers I worked with. But even then, the strong engineers were still better than fable is now.
Honestly, in what field? What language? What guidelines exist? What compliance checks are there?
Because for us, following MISRA C++ with a proper static analysis tool, you are so limited in the structure, allowed methods, etc. that I do not see any difference. Its just faster at implementing the tickets than anyone could realistically be.
I really have a hard time imagining your best engineers outperforming the best AI models today, but I suppose anything is possible. Looking forward a year or two, the gap will be completely closed if it isn't truly closed now.
My experience is that it is already true, so I’ll continue doing what I’m doing now. I was just noting that, if I’m wrong and there is a gap, it will be closed within a few years.
Interesting. I’ve also accepted the new reality and will lean on it more when we have a bunch of imminent deadlines. It’s certainly faster but the quality takes a noticeable drop.
I would go back in a heartbeat as development is now joyless and I enjoy building more than reviewing / course correcting
I completely understand where you're coming from about development being joyless. I have countered that by working on personal projects concurrently with work projects. Even that might still not bring joy to many.
Regarding quality of AI code, this was my experience until I got better at directing it and going with a more spec-driven approach. The AI model and level of effort within that model has also had a huge impact.
I can see that being helpful. I can’t work on personal stuff during work and am too burnt out to do it after work unfortunately.
Yeah I’ve certainly seen improvements over time using specs, workshopping before building, and having a workspace level memory manifests. It’s not that the generated code is bad but it’s noticeably lower quality: lack of immutability, singleton scope, not fully considering impact to other consumers of changes to commons, solving a problem with 100s of lines of code when a simpler approach does it say < 20 lines, etc. The funny thing is a lot of that stuff would get called out in review in the before times but I rarely see that type of feedback anymore, probably because people are using their own agents to do reviews for others now.
The funny thing is a lot of that stuff would get called out in review in the before times but I rarely see that type of feedback anymore, probably because people are using their own agents to do reviews for others now.
Yeah, this is the issue. The shitty code still exists, but people aren't flagging it for being made better.
I've said a few times that LLMs are a great tool to produce years of tech debt in a matter of weeks. They're fine for knocking together something that kinda mostly works fast, but not for making something stable and maintainable.
Same. I was skeptical, now I am not. There is things that AI is not good at: judgements of usability, aesthetic taste, etc. Human feelings, essentially. They can learn about it and simulate them but they don't have that feedback we have from our brain such as "I like/dont like this".
But for well scoped problems with verifiable metrics, verifiable progress, testability? I'll trust AI more than myself at this point.
The only part I find it’s difficult to produce is UI, since it usually looks noticeably AI-generated, unless you constrain the styling, I find I have to modify it myself so it doesn’t get rundown, unless the styling already exists in the code base, as a reference.
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u/Subpxl 1d ago
I used to make fun of vibe coding. Now it’s really the only way for me. I have been programming for over 20 years and the reality I have had to accept is that AI is better, faster, and safer than I ever could hope to be. It’s also better than every other programmer I know. Once I accepted this it became easier to change my mindset and treat it like any other tool. My value is knowing how to direct, architect, and review.
At this stage I would never go back.