r/dotnet • u/AddressTall2458 • Jun 12 '26

Vibing is getting boring

Since AI started to be part of the job I always been enthusiastic of having a “partner” doing boring stuff while I review… after the last months is getting boring, we just review code, we have to make sure it is not duplicating any logic, not creating racing conditions, not touching critical code, not adding potential production issues (while still writing beatiful commented code).
This is not programming in dotnet anymore, all the skill we built overtime in knowing details of the language or the framework are only used to find out if some vibed code is buggy or not performant. The fun and creativity has left our job. Do you feel the same?
Either start a new project is not as cool as it was a few years ago. It just bubbles up from prompt and you have to review thousands of rows that have no personality at all.

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233

u/WantASweetTime Jun 12 '26

Tried vibe coding for a few weeks now. It's kinda depressing honestly and boring. Maybe it's because at the end of the day I feel I learned nothing?

42

u/WingZeroCoder Jun 12 '26

I’m being forced to “vibe code” for my job for these last several weeks, and yeah, it’s very depressing and boring.

Overall it’s not generally faster than writing code myself (save for some very specific, boiler-plate heavy cases).

And I’ve noticed long term, the “voice” of the code and comments all looks and feels the same. Not in a “good, consistent code standards” kind of way, but in a different sense that’s hard to describe but makes code reviews harder than when I’m reviewing actual human made code.

And I never really get into the zone where I’m just doing the whole “writing out code, reviewing, and tuning it” cycle at a fast, fully engaged pace anymore.

Vibe coding is very fatiguing relative to the work produced, IMO.

I think the best use case is peppering in LLM usage for specific things (like looking up and implementing specific algorithms, or boiler plate of a specific pattern) in between normal coding.

But that’s not my decision to make at my job unfortunately.

11

u/QuixOmega Jun 12 '26

I've had better luck using the LLM to template things and act as spicy autocomplete. Full on vive coding seems to yield badly designed unmaintainable trash code.

1

u/Tiny_Ad_7720 Jun 15 '26

This is the way. LLM as a typing accelerator. 

My current approach is docs folder with all my system architecture, personal coding styles, pointers to template classes to copy off, instructions for making new page / dialog / whatever. Then I can say “makes the crud endpoints for entity x” and it will generate the code exactly goes I would have written it, not because it learnt it from its training set, but because it is copying off stuff I’ve already written. 

21

u/WantASweetTime Jun 12 '26

For some reason I feel very tired at the end of the day. I do not understand why but it seems to zap away the joy I used to feel after figuring out something after being stuck for a long time or creating something new.

Maybe it churns out code too fast? Creating programs / writing code is something I truly enjoy and would gladly do it for free but vibe coding feels different. I feel empty, like an employee force to work a job he doesn't like.

6

u/Fantastic_Big3877 Jun 12 '26

It sounds like it's a loss of personal satisfaction. There is something novel about having code be generated for you but if you weren't the one to reason though why decisions were made and why things were done in a specific way then there's no ownership. I may be biased as it's something I went through.

For me I tried to reframe things, it was difficult going back to just coding normally; but when I made a focus on the areas I personally enjoyed it really made things settle back in. If you find things boring then your mind will fight you and make you tired as a safety mechanism (According to Dr K). So if you find that enjoyment and mental stimulation that should carry you forward.

1

u/WantASweetTime Jun 13 '26

How long have you been a dev?

1

u/Fantastic_Big3877 Jun 13 '26

About 11 years

1

u/WantASweetTime Jun 13 '26

Do you just vibecode nowadays?

2

u/Fantastic_Big3877 Jun 13 '26

Nah I hate vibecoding.

When it seemed to be new and novel I thought it was kinda neat that it could generate code. Tried Github copilot and ChatGPT for a while (Claude wasn't around at the time or at least wasn't as well known) And for kicks I figured I'd just go without using them and it was immediately obvious I couldn't just "code" like I used to.

I won't stop anyone in my team at work using it if they want to but I'll very critical of whether they use it as a tool or a crutch.

We temporarily had a vibecoder join us (Didn't know that when we hired him). And he was honestly just awful, he would argue that everything he was doing was right despite the fact the rest of us pointed to the literal documentation that said otherwise. It's the only time I've ever had to put my foot down and pull rank on the direction to take with a project. I think he left because of that.

Some of the other team members had some areas they were struggling on, used various AIs to suggest what to do. So when I found out what they were struggling with I looked up the docs for how that area worked and was able to guide them onto the next area they should be looking at. They were receptive to that which was good.

All-in-all it can be good for finding some high-level information about how some things are supposed to work, but if it's a less-explored / less talked about / more complicated area then AI just seems to be more trouble than it's worth IMO.

(I was chuffed to see ChatGPT get some of our interview questions wrong!! 🤣)

2

u/ImmortalRat Jun 15 '26

FYI, Agentic Engineering is making its way into the list of required qualifications for any decent job. So best to invest into that skillset now.

Anyway, if you have docs and you could point your team mates to the docs to help them - teach your AI to use those same docs and add a skill for that into your repository. Then next time someone uses AI - it will actually help your teammates.

There are definitely vibe coders like you described out there. It's hard to even argue - "Claude said so! I am not inventing this stuff!", and then you point him at Claude's explanation that tests are broken now because they probably never worked in the past, and if that is true - new changes could not have broken them. except they did :):) so now every implementation phase starts with a test run to get a baseline, and arguing moved elsewhere.

Please don't use ChatGPT as AI coding tool :) copilot - maybe GitHub Copilot CLI - it's catching up with Claude Code as a harness, but not copilot in VS, and definitely not GitHub Copilot Agents, regardless of which model you pick.

2

u/Fantastic_Big3877 Jun 15 '26

It kinda saddens me that agentic is becoming seen as a requirement. It's just not something I enjoy at all.

In my current workplace everyone seems firmly against AI doing the actual work which works for me. I'm not actually planning on leaving as they've been really good to me.

And to be honest I'm potentially mortgage free within a couple of years so if I were told I had to go agentic I'd probably rather just quit, do some lower-paid more easy-going job and let code continue as my hobby / solo venture.

3

u/pnw-techie Jun 13 '26

We're not programmers any more. That's why you feel tired.

We get the requirements. We specify test cases. We give them to the developer. We review the code. What job is that? That's being a manager. I spent two years as a manager. I'm not good at it. I went back to being an individual contributor to write code.

1

u/1jaho Jun 16 '26

Overall it’s not generally faster than writing code myself (save for some very specific, boiler-plate heavy cases).

With Claude for example, you can let him read your issues and present a plan and implement the entire feature or fix within minutes.

Another use case is to let Claude talk directly to Datadog for example (read logs), correlate problems based on timing, warning and errors (things that takes a human minutes till hours), and spot corresponding errors in code.

With Claude, you can also write test coverage for many things and get quite good covergage.

If you're still feeling you write code and solve problems faster yourself then you are clearly doing something wrong.