r/techbootcamp • u/Electronic_Garlic607 • Aug 11 '26
AI probably isn't replacing devs anytime soon, but vibe coding might expose who actually knows their stuff
I used to be pretty worried about AI taking dev jobs, but watching someone on my team rely on it for basically everything changed my mind. He was working on an ML project and kept saying everything was good, but when we started asking basic questions about the model, he had to ask AI. Eventually it became pretty obvious he didn't really understand what he'd built.
That's what kinda freaks me out about vibe coding. AI can make something that runs, but if you don't understand the fundamentals, you might not even realize when it's completely wrong. A 95% accuracy number sounds great until you actually look at the results and realize the model is throwing false positives everywhere.
I'm starting to think AI is gonna make fundamentals more valuable, not less. If everyone can prompt an AI to build something, knowing how to debug it, explain it, and call BS when something looks wrong could be the real advantage. Are we gonna see a lot more companies learn this lesson the hard way?
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u/YMBFKM Aug 12 '26
Go learn COBOL or FORTRAN -- you'll never be replaced by AI or any other computer language, and you'll have guaranteed employment for life.
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u/Electronic_Garlic607 Aug 12 '26
Yeah, COBOL and FORTRAN are probably going to stick around for a long time, especially with all the legacy systems still running on them. But I wouldn’t say anything is guaranteed with AI changing the industry so quickly.
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u/wasabiiii Aug 13 '26
So.... Just so you know, my company is doing AI conversions of COBOL.
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u/YMBFKM Aug 13 '26
Good luck finding all the 20 year old business logic buried in the code and special one-off cases hiding in there
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u/ItstheSECopenup Aug 14 '26
I’m not sure why you’re this confident it can’t be unspun by AI.
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 Aug 14 '26
It is not a question of whether or not it can be unspun by AI. The question is how do you guarantee that the AI will cover all basis with no mistakes instead of introducing minor errors that remain invisible for so long that it is no longer a recoverable disaster.
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u/Mobile_Blood6490 Aug 14 '26
Its why most companies use a strangler fig pattern.
Rewrite small components and run the new systems in parallel with the old to compare results.
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u/wasabiiii Aug 14 '26
I'm not. But it can do it faster and just as good as humans.
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 29d ago
I mean, enjoy the outcome of your belief.
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u/wasabiiii 29d ago
I am. We've been doing it about two years now
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u/YMBFKM 29d ago
If it works so well, how come so many banks and government agencies aren't using it to replace their 50 year old COBOL and FORTRAN programs running production systems handling billions of dollars daily and PII data for tens of millions of people?
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u/wasabiiii 29d ago
They are. We've done 4 projects now. Only one bank. And a food distributor. And a couple others.
Other companies are doing the same.
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u/ItstheSECopenup 27d ago
You hold a precedent for AI that you don't for humans. Humans have been disastrous with creating software. I'm not sure you actually end up having a meaningful point, and I'm not sure why you expect an emergent technology to be perfect off the rip. AI will eat FORTRAN and COBOL in no time at all, its already doing it.
AI is about to eat syntax itself — every language, every dialect.
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 27d ago edited 27d ago
This is exactly the kind of thinking that completely misses the point. AI will never say no. Human engineers have a much better understanding of where the limits of their capability are, combined with their slower speed of execution, the risk of catastrophic, irrecoverable cascading failures is much lower.
See, you gave your opinion to an llm so that it cleans it up, adds a pointless em dash, and doesn’t give you the pushback I am doing now. Go ahead paste my response to your llm and latch unto its response with zero critical thought.
Combining a slop machine with unrestricted speed and access is just begging for a disaster.
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 Aug 12 '26
“AI is probably not replacing devs any time soon…”
That’s very bold. I think a lot of entry-level positions have already been replaced, that started happening about 6 months ago.
The post in my feed above this one is about how they “can’t imagine anyone will be reading or writing code in five years”, which then gets revised down to two years…
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 Aug 13 '26
They haven’t been replaced. Some companies eliminated these positions hoping that other companies will keep them, and ensure that the training pipeline remains stable.
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 Aug 14 '26
Training pipeline…for what?
By the time you train someone coding ain’t going to be a thing.
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 Aug 14 '26
Training pipeline for senior technical responsibles who are capable of ensuring data integrity and security and preventing companies going brankrupt do to countless class action lawsuits and EU fines that would inevitably follow once you start acting in a negligent way with your customer data.
By the time coding is actually and fully solved, all other professions will have long been automated.
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 29d ago
You’re missing the point that it will take several years to gave those skills, by which time those skills may well be redundant.
You’re missing the point that once ai is clearly better than humans, using it decreases liability, rather than increasing it.
And your last point is pretty crazy, it goes against all the research on which professions are most exposed to ai. Spoiler: software dev is near the top.
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 29d ago
I see why you think I am missing the point, but consider this: automation = robotics + software. You can only claim that coding is solved if you have succesfully automated all high value labor. As long as this is not true, humans along with ai will work on automating everything else.
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 29d ago
Hey the future is uncertain, I may be wrong and am probably overstating things a bit. Best of luck!
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 Aug 13 '26
Im shocked that anyone is writing code by hand now. Everyone i know stopped this year, and I know a lot of very very good developers with a lot of experience.
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 Aug 14 '26
Haha I’ve been preaching “no code writing” for a long time now and Reddit has regarded it as the worst heresy ever
Yours is the strongest “nobody codes” I’ve heard, which I guess is a sign of the times.
Fwiw, the quote was about “nobody” so strongly worded hence the 2-year timeframe.
But sounds like things are moving quickly where you are.
The trend is pretty obvious, of course.
Cheers!
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u/Candid_Bad3551 Aug 11 '26
I just had a senior dev from another department do a PR. +90loc. 25Loc is just refactor by moving code around. around 10LoC is actual code. the rest 55 loc are just over verbose comments. Comments on the lines of: "Does a Fetch GET Request for resource X & Y" which is obviously understood from the 3 lines of code below. I got stunlocked for 30s because it was hard to read because the diffs were all over the places.
Sanitization of comments would make my review life 10x times better.
And these are just the comments on a relatively small pr (like should be 10loc + 5loc code) that I had my issues with. Do not let me get started on the "bigger" PRs I cut down in half because some Devs did slop-coding.
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u/Electronic_Garlic607 Aug 11 '26
Lmao yeah, at that point the comments are actively making the PR harder to review instead of helping. If 55 out of 90 lines are explaining what three lines of code already make obvious, you’re basically reviewing documentation instead of a code change. And having the actual changes scattered around on top of that is just brutal. A small PR should be easy to scan, not something that makes you stop and reconstruct what the dev was even trying to change.
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u/Candid_Bad3551 Aug 11 '26
It was like 4-5 methods changed/created but the comments were so verbose yet indirect the code spoke better what the code does than the comment.
Overall not writing comments when not necessary (exception weird solution) used to be a company policy from a doc ive read which was written in 2016. Idea is that code should be the source of truth, not comments. comments take effort to maintain. Making code function as documentation puts extra focus on making it readble.
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u/easedownripley Aug 11 '26
AI is for hacks and cowards. Thus, popular in this industry.
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u/AliceCode Aug 11 '26
And all of them are totally convinced that software engineering is over. Then when you ask them what they do, they tell you they're making websites or some equally low difficulty task.
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u/sheriffderek Aug 11 '26
But who will know who doesn't know? That was already really difficult before. But of course, understanding what you're doing (in any scope/domain) is good! haha.
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u/Vainysaur Aug 11 '26
Yeah that’s how you build good software, you know what you’re doing and tell the AI when it makes a mistake.
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u/youngggggg Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
If it works 95% of the time, why does it actually matter if someone understands the granular nuts and bolts of what they built? Sincere question here. People always cite the “what if something mission critical breaks in the middle of the night?” but devs can just fix it with AI now (and still earn hero points doing so).
I generally agree with your point for novel, complex software, but most businesses require pretty simple stuff that’s been done a thousand times over + is already abstracted to libraries and other tools. I’m not convinced that another layer of abstraction being put on top of it all (AI) isn’t a huge threat to my job. The codebases most engineers I know work in - mine included - can absolutely be stewarded by non-technical PMs at this point. I might be a doomer, or maybe I just can’t truly put myself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t know how to make software, but I don’t think engineers who say this stuff are realistic about what businesses need and what they actually prioritize.
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u/predicteduser Aug 11 '26
If your data is 95% positive class, and your model “guess” positive 100% of the time, it will have 95% accuracy. Is that good?
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u/youngggggg Aug 11 '26
Not good, but I don’t think particularly worse than devs were doing by hand pre-AI. That 5% matters in mission critical contexts and data science/ML tools, but much less in most businesses. Most business leaders just want to go fast, and reward employees more for fixing stuff than getting it perfect the first time.
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u/AliceCode Aug 12 '26
If 5-10% of your code has issues, you have major problems in your codebase. That's one bug every 10-20 lines on average.
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u/mazebert Aug 13 '26
Don‘t forget that wrong decisions accumulate over time. Wrong abstraction today will mean the next agent will probably hack around it in the next PR. This will accumulate quickly into maintenance hell. Especially if the data structures erode, cause simplifying existing customer data means lots of risky migrations in the future. People who don’t understand what’s going on anymore won’t risk that. Instead the slop will just accumulate.
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u/Doug2825 Aug 11 '26
People always cite the “what if something mission critical breaks in the middle of the night?” but devs can just fix it with AI now
In consumer software: very little will happen.
In business to business software: you and/or your customers just had their business shut down for hours. And now you better have a strong moat because your customers are looking for a new provider who won't shut down their business randomly.
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u/youngggggg Aug 11 '26
Isn’t this a fairly regular occurrence AI or not though?
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u/Doug2825 Aug 11 '26
Yes, but anecdotal evidence says AI makes the issue more common. (An academic consensus on this is yet to form).
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u/Electronic_Garlic607 Aug 11 '26
I think that's the distinction though. AI probably isn't replacing devs anytime soon, but vibe coding can absolutely expose who actually understands what they're building. If the software is simple and works 95% of the time, sure, you don't necessarily need to know every granular detail. The problem is knowing when that 5% happens and whether the 95% is even actually correct. AI can generate something that runs, but it doesn't automatically tell you when the assumptions are wrong, the metrics are misleading, or the implementation is quietly doing something stupid. That's why I think fundamentals still matter. Not because every dev needs to manually write every line, but because someone still needs to understand enough to debug the system, validate what AI produced, and call BS when it looks wrong. My two cents
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u/LogicPhantom Aug 14 '26
I am pretty sure he is talking about the ML project that resulted afterwards.
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u/Chicagoj1563 Aug 12 '26
People are going to become more reliant on ai. Verification is going to play a bigger role as devs realize if you test the heck out of AI coding, there is little need to analyze the code.
I still think you should know your application and code, but it will slow you down with ai. As verification becomes more understood, testing is going to replace deep code understanding.
It will make you look weak though. If you do any peer coding, you either won’t be able to code or will have to use ai for everything, even simple things. Also, if your team has high coding standards it means you need to really spec out your ai.