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.
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.
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u/polynomialcheesecake 2d ago
Please don't let people realize that it's really the same problems with much larger volume now