Hello programmers! I’ve been making a living for a couple of decades figuring out stuff for people and coding whatever will make them happy. It’s fun. I’ve grown to prefer the people to the coding but I still get a kick out of the whole thing.
The problem is: at the job we’re being asked to pivot to vibe coding. At this point the order is to use it for all code, read the slop carefully, argue with the machine for way too long and only then open that PR. Massive productivity gains are expected. I’m appalled from an ethical, philosophical and professional standpoint. We’re a non-profit ngo ffs. My colleagues are fine with it. If I get even slightly critical the group goes awkwardly silent and I get comments on how all the programmers they know from other places don’t code anymore.
If this is how it goes from now on, I’m out. Is it really though? Are all businesses switching to vibe coding? Have some of you started switching career? I think I want to go to meatspace. Hand-made coding could make a cute hobby.
We have a junior who is honestly good at coding and a quick learner, but he refuses to use AI.
In the past, he’d definitely be praised for his food work. But now he’s being reprimanded because he’s too “slow” compared to the other junior vibe coders.
The vibe coders barely understand their own code though.
It’s an absolute headache, I fear for the future of the newer generations of software engineers. And I feel terrible for the guys that just wants to learn and grow. It’s such a fun profession if you get the room to discover, AI sucks all fun out of it.
As a senior myself, I focus a lot more on stuff besides coding now, but as somewhat of a mentor, fuck AI. People starting out are barely learning, if the AI bubble ever pop, they are fucked.
Using AI codegen feels like returning to a beginner all over again. Throwing shit at a wall, begging the AI to cooperate, getting frustrated because nothing works and I can’t do anything to fix it because none of the code is mine.
I swear this was a phase I grew out of after years of dedicated practice. Now I’m forced back into it again.
One question I have for the slop advocates in this thread is this - do you not like programming? Did you fall for the „learn to code“ meme and just learned the bare minimum to get a paycheque working on web dashboards?
Like why would you voluntarily cut out the most enjoyable part of the job, and go around scoffing at people who don’t want to do that?
Productivity is my boss’s problem, not mine, and I’d rather go and try and farm geese (I hate geese) than spend my whole day reading LLM generated code.
“LLM is just to replace the boring parts”
The boring parts so far:
- Writing and reading emails (aka communicating in the written form with other humans)
- Taking notes in meetings (aka paying attention to people when they speak to you)
- Documenting systems (aka letting your future self know what was going on in [insert year])
- Designing systems (aka letting your present self know what is going on)
- Building systems (aka doing your fucking job)
What is even the non boring part? Ordering machines around? Whatever happened to “ideas are cheap execution is everything”?
I’m far from a slop advocate, so this is more of a devil’s advocate point: plenty of code writing is not enjoyable.
If I’m working on my own project, to my own standards, writing exactly what I want to write I’m usually going to get enjoyment out of it. That’s pretty commonly not the case when writing code for an employer. Maybe the tech stack sucks, the product is inane or worse, you think the feature is a dumb idea but have to do it anyway, you’re bending over backwards to work around tech debt that you’re not allowed by management to fix, or you have to appease incompetent/out of touch architects or tech leads who presume to tell you how to do your job. I personally don’t enjoy writing that code very much. At a certain point it’s almost like nails on a chalkboard if you genuinely enjoy programming for its own sake: you know what good would look like, you know how far away what you’re working on is from good, and you feel sad at all the organizational inertia you’d need to overcome to get to good or, choosing not to do that, at compromising your standards. That bugs me, at least, and at a certain point makes it hard to even start certain work projects.
LLMs can make this at least bearable. Rather than spending hours looking into the change yourself, writing all of the code, fighting the shitty test framework and swearing at the past engineers who made it so bad, you let the robot figure it out and review its work. The result may still suck, but it was going to suck if you wrote it by hand too, for reasons largely out of your control. You can’t be fully hands off, and you still have to deal with the things you don’t like to get a good result, but you put yourself a step away from what bothers you and by doing so make it a little more pleasant. And, when you find work that’s actually fun, interesting, or rewarding, you just cherry pick that for yourself. I’ve grown to appreciate them for this reason. I have a lot less dread for the nails on a chalkboard work than I used to, anyway.
When my AI fucks up code I sometimes think “I probably would have fucked that up too”. And then I make it write 50 more tests in 2 minutes so it doesn’t happen again. The ROI in time saving is too tantalizing for me to be a meat-only code monkey.
It does really need all those tests. But they probably should have existed anyway and I’m damn sure most devs out there weren’t going to be so obsessive with coverage.
I hate tdd. But this is what happened and now I am so glad they birthed that unholy methodology
Programming was never enjoyable to me.
Making things is. LLMs allow you to be extremely pragmatic and enjoy making things or troubleshooting things without tedious line by line nature.
I use LLMs for code development, but I’ve found it’s only good for (a) boilerplate-level stuff I already know how to do and don’t want to deal with, or (b) VERY small tasks. Anything even moderately complex (at least by my opinion) blows LLM’s context budget and it instantly produces trash (any moderately comp-sci-interested highschool intern would write better code) that costs more time to analyze and fix than it would have taken to write it from scratch in the first place.
I love programming. I’m ok with others having access to programming that otherwise wouldn’t. I’m not having as much fun being a project manager instead. I don’t scoff at handwork coders. I’m also not going to pretend that they don’t code poorly without guidance. If you know coding you will be better at using them, but not significantly. I miss coding. I don’t understand quite why you are angry that I want to eat and provide for the family?
I don’t understand quite why you are angry that I want to eat and provide for the family?
Because it’s neither necessary nor morally neutral.
It’s not necessary that my family eat?
I like to code. I like tools. There is a trap in using the LLM tool for everything. A Maslow’s hammer and everything looks like a nail type of trap.
The responses to your question makes me fear for the future of products.
I use LLMs for scaffolding, boilerplate stuff, and basically things I can trust a junior with. For anything else, I have been forced to write it myself or rewrite it because the agents were so goddamn awful at it.
Reading that people even think programming has nothing to do with code and is just solving problems is just nuts to me. Code is a spec for a problem solution. If someone thinks the spec is neither important nor that being able to understand the spec is important… It’s like saying “I don’t care how this bridge is designed, it’s built”. Say that again and tell me it doesn’t sound nuts.
It explains a lot about the industry before the advent of LLMs. I always wondered why Node.js took over in web dev so quickly and that so many people only care about having something done makes sense. I just wish they weren’t destroying one of my few favourite things about humanity (Open Source Software) while they wallow in their own misery.
LLM won’t destroy OSS for me. It will actually be the only thing left to use because proprietary software will be the first place for LLMs to take over.
The problem with it is that it’s destroying the motivation of maintainers and causing projects to become closed to new contributors due to people not respecting contribution guidelines with agentic LLMs. It’s not necessarily destroying quality for those that have standards, but it is destroying the community.
Writing code was never “the job”, that is just the trivial typing part you do when the thinking and designing ends. The job is solving problems (which I enjoy very much thanks.)
This is like people who refuse to program in another language because they are “a .NET programmer”. That just tells me you’re a coder not an engineer. In my career I’ve been paid good money to write C51 assembler, C, C++, Tcl, Limbo, Java, C# and Rust (roughly in order) - LLMs are just what’s next.
I have written in hundreds of languages, but syntax is syntax. The job was writing code. That’s what we mean when we say “coding”. We dont mean “pressing keys”. We don’t mean “writing a romance novel”. This argument is empty as the robots suggestion pattern for your SaaS bl
If your job was writing code, and not designing solutions to solve problems, for which code was just the final expression - then I’m sorry, you do need to find a new career. Best of luck.
It’s idiotic to continue arguing that a coder and coding is not interchangable with programmer or developer, that you don’t understand what people mean and mansplain about a job that never existed, except long ago when they had women make punch cards that were already written. It’s utterly useless to teach a difference in words that is wrong and a distinction that doesen’t exist. Do you think the layman will start to use your dissasociated term for coder and hallucinate a job description that doesen’t exist.
There’s nothing to prevent you from writing code in an IDE while the torment nexus TUI churns out whatever monster misfeature request was waiting for you in your Jira queue this morning.
In fact I’d recommend doing the code writing part. It helps, even if it increasingly becomes a rounding error in your overall output.
It’s bleak as shit right now. God why couldn’t this have waited until after my retirement.
I do enjoy programming, but I prefer “getting stuff done”. While I enjoy programming, I’d rather just get it done and move on. I like the results of having programmed.
Productivity is my problem, because I build stuff for myself, not just for my boss.
The jobs I have had over the last year have been heavily pushing it, yes.
it’s not gonna last. if you tune out of the hype and actually look at some hard data, vibecoding stops looking so hot: https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/08/12/ai-software-development-what-does-the-data-say/
the current token costs are unsustainable also. the only ones making bank right now are the shovel sellers: https://isaiprofitable.com/
personally i’m working on hand-rewriting several projects vibecoded out by a non-dev in a small shop. not only is a lot of this straight up broken nonsense, the amount of tech debt is staggering. previous job wasn’t better, i had to spend more time fixing slop from former coworkers than actually introducing new features. keep your skills sharp and persevere. we’ll get through this.
tl;dr: this, too, shall pass. but holy shit.
keep your skills sharp and persevere. we’ll get through this.
We’ll be the next generation that writes malware no one can stop
It’s absolutely going to last. IMO until Astra the models were not good enough to really be worth bothering with, but we’ve reached a tipping point.
And while I still do read the code they make and then fix things (or tell them to do things differently), it’s still waaaay quicker than doing it “by hand”.
Sorry but if you’re expecting this to be a temporary thing you’re going to be very disappointed.
IMO until Astra the models were not good enough to really be worth bothering with, but we’ve reached a tipping point.
People said the same about older models.
Yep. Every. Single. One.
I agree with you except for the Astra bit. The differences in day to day are marginal at best (compared to both Sol and Anthropic equivalents) and the paradigm shift came long before it.
It’s copium, which is understandable. I think it’s really important for people who want to have a reliable career in the industry 5+ years from now, to learn harness coding even if begrudgingly.
You know the current state of IT security? It’s bad.
Aand here comes AI. It will not make it better, even though it finds some issues faster.If vibe coding remains the norm and is actually sustainable, there won’t be a reliable career. You’ll be weavers being put out of work by the autoloom. You’re worthless to them. What can you do that someone with six weeks (or less) of training can’t?
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But being able to ship small, mildly broken, internal tools for my non-technical coworkers quickly is actually amazing.
Nobody cares if the internal tool code is nice, but when it shaves 50% of the work off of sales the sales team gets excited. So if I vibe up a shitty UI it’s still a net gain.
I’ve probably automated away like 60% of the ad hoc work I used to get into internal tools, and that has helped a ton with workload and budget.
Careful. You know how it goes with temporary workarounds? Suddenly, you find yourself maintaining slightly broken load-bearing slop.
That’s a fair concern, usually I only vibe the UI.
I’m not a front end guy, so as long as I know the backends is good I’m fine with it.
Yeah, it’s only the user’s experience fucked over when the UI is sloped together.
Although I agree with you…
That’s how the vast majority of software has been built for the past couple of decades. LLM’s aren’t different in that regard, just faster.
Upvoted because I want it to be true
I am working in a very small company as a software dev and write everything by hand. I wrote some weeks ago in a different thread here that I tried all of the LLM powered coding tools and found all of them subpar.
If this company goes downhill or I lose the job otherwise, I will work something entirely different.
My very arrogant point of view is that these “vibecoding” tools are being celebrated by people who were making shit software before and now make software that is slightly less shit in what they perceive is the same amount of time, but I suspect it takes them actually longer. Meanwhile, they don’t grow their programming skills at all.
I’m a full time code monkey. Last week I met a woman who created an on-line app. I asked her, “Oh, you must be a software engineer!” She laughed and said, no - she made it with Claude in about six months.
I felt a little deflated. This, the job I studied for, got a Masters degree in, working full time. It’s being supplanted by someone with no experience and an idea.
Of course, the site was buggy with UI issues, but it still stick in my craw a bit.
The job you studied for and got a masters degree in (congratulations, sincerely) was hollowed-out and deskilled years ago; it has been profoundly depressing watching the industry taken over by people who think a 6 month vocational course in Typescript and 6 months of not getting fired qualifies them as a senior engineer, with absolutely zero understanding of basics like information theory or concurrency mechanisms or, well, any basic engineering. These are the fuckers who have been producing spaghetti applications built on a MySQL (God burn its soul in hell) database with no relational integrity (“foreign keys make it slow!”) and no thought to scalability or resilience that someone else then gets to fix when the shit hits the fan.
That those people are going to be replaced with AI shouldn’t give anyone pause to weep. The arrival of AI to do their jobs is an opportunity to reverse the deskilling the industry has spent the last three decades working on - one really genuinely good engineer with an AI can now replace one really good engineer tearing her hair out at the half dozen absolute idiots she is asked to work with to deliver anything today.
I am not a programmer, but related to a few. My cousin said his workplace actively evaluates people on token usage, where more is better. He has refined his prompts to burn as many tokens as possible.
Another relative said they only hire seniors now, and use AI for junior work. I told him there will be no more seniors in five years, doing things that way. Well, that’s a problem for later.
There are two things we measure inadequately with junior/senior. There are people who are highly skilled and have aptitude and passion for engineering - they are junior for lack of experience, but will be senior in good time.
Then there are people who are simply shit, who probably call themselves “coders”, who are proud of being self-taught by hacking out Javascript or got a vocational qualification from a Poly. They will remain junior forever (unless they work in outsourcing, in which case they’ll be billed as senior devs if they can bluff their way through for 6 months.)
The latter are fucked, the former will be fine; I suspect we’re going back to a world as it was 30 or 40 years ago though, where the quality of your degree is far more important and the number of vacancies far lower. I rather hope the death of outsourcing will also finally mean an end to the ridiculous job-title/expertise inflation that sector has wrought upon the industry.
What you described is not vibe coding. Vibe coding is when you don’t read the code.
This isn’t wrong, but it isn’t relevant either.
How is it not relevant? The OP is propagating a misconception.
Because you know what he’s talking about and aren’t actually addressing the problems in question.
Vibe coding is fart coding whether you checked it or not. You still cheated and you didn’t use your own cognitive utilities…
AI codegen is dumb as fuck. It doesn’t understand system design at all.
I do use it to catch careless mistakes in nonformal connected parts of code though.
Professional coder turned vibe coder here. My approach has been to lean in really heavy on creating deterministic harnesses and guardrails, that can also be templated for bootstrapping new slop projects quickly and easily.
Then I end up just getting paid to press button make feature go brrrr, and on my other monitor I work on personal projects that I actually care about, while simultaneously being paid because I press button make feature go brrrr.
Spending the time curating my harnesses and workflows, including pretty rigorous automated testing of what Claude shits out, is what keeps it all together. You can’t just set it and forget it. Something about that is fun to me, though, because I am masochistic devops man.
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How the fuck are you all tech people, yet you don’t realize that the tech you are seeing now is only gonna get better and more powerful?! Do you all suddenly turn off your logical brains when it comes to AI? It’s technology. This is early days. Look how powerful it is now, now imagine in 5 years.
I genuinely can’t understand how anyone can work in tech and not find this stuff incredibly exciting. I acknowledge that all the stuff about AGI and singularities is bullshit, that the cast of characters promoting it is full of idiots and hucksters, and that there is a wild financial bubble behind that is going to pop catastrophically (and hopefully take OpenAI and Anthropic down with it) - but at the same time, it is one of the most exciting technological achievements of my lifetime and just being able to be a tiny part of it makes it an amazing time to be alive.
I question if any of the neo-luddites actually ever had any love of the industry they work in if the current progression of LLMs doesn’t amaze and inspire them.
Seems like vibe coding is now all about setting up gard rails for the chatbot, which does not sound remotely fun to me compared to actually writing the code.
You’re not wrong, and to each his own. I’m a workflow and automation nerd, so it’s down my alley personally.
Thanks for sharing your workflow. I’m already pretty fed up on how tech just keeps on adding layers upon layers of complexity. I love understanding what goes on. You can imagine I’m not thrilled.
These people are the ones causing the problems. They tell you they’ve got it all figured out make it sound great but they’re the ones shitting out garbage faster than you can fix it.
If you’re gonna talk shit about my skills you could at least @ me. I’ve worked decades in the industry, with a lot of that time knee-deep in dev tooling and devops. It’s a cake walk keeping an LLM on guard rails producing well-tested code if you’re a seasoned and sane architect, compared to say, humans. Sorry you can’t seem to wrap your head around it.
I’ve worked decades in the industry
That doesn’t mean anything. I have seen senior developers who built up “street cred” for decades fall into the vibecoding trap and deskill themselves rapidly.
Wow, you sound insufferable.
Congratulations on giving up your career, though. I’m sure the “architect” will take care of you.
I’m not sure how you gathered I gave up my career. I adapted to the trend, and now make more money with less effort. And when the wind changes, I’ll adapt again, until I’m put out to pasture.
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That’s pretty great actually!
I’ve so far managed to avoid being mandated vibe coding at work since I have some pull at the company, so I don’t have a ton of experience working with it.
How long does each brrrr take? Does it give you a reasonable amount of time to sink into a personal project before it completes?
I have hand-rolled agents/skills that run through a standardized process:
- investigate
- plan
- execute
- self-review
- open PR
I leverage bash and python scripts whenever possible within harnesses, to try to avoid Claude injecting flair where steps and processes should be as repeatable as possible. I also write a lot of supplementary skills for it to use, with least-privilege scoping (important!), to give it access to do things like read work request tickets, run staging smoke tests, etc.
You can get to a point where you can basically say something like, “Investigate and plan SWE-1773” and it’ll do all the shit, spit out a human-readable markdown plan complete with mermaid diagrams. You then okay to execute it, and at the end do an earnest PR review, and some manual tests.
Each brrr is gonna depend on how thorough you need to be, feature sizes, and if it shits the bed during planning. But honestly, the likelihood of your LLM shitting the bed is heavily dependent on how good of a harness engineer you want to become. If you shape and mold the environment and workflow like someone who say, works in developer tooling, then output quality can become surprisingly reliable.
You said you work on personal projects while it brrrrs. Of course it depends, but are we talking personal projects 30s at a time, 10 min at a time, or an hour?
I’d say that in an ~8hr workday, an average of 60-70% of my workday is spent doing stuff I want to do.
I can’t comment on cadence. Protip is to leverage git worktrees, multiple Claude session, and then spin up multiple feature requests at a time. This maintains “productivity” expectations and gives you longer spans of time to “multi-task.”
I’m happy I left software development two years ago, now I only have to occasionally deal with researchers using LLMs to generate crappy code instead of writing crappy code themselves. And of course suffer the consequences of vibe coding as a user of crappy software.
Just have it do the tedious parts while you do the high-level planning. The interview with Matt Pocock on Pragmatic Engineer (podcast) discussed this approach in the latest episode. If I had to guess, I’d say that part of the conversation happened in the last 30 or 40 minutes of the interview, but the whole thing was interesting.
In the future there will be a huge job market for un-vibing code bases, I guarantee it
It is heavily normalized in industry now.
I quit a job that added AI use to performance reviews super early. That was pure bureaucratic cancer and most of my good coworkers burned out and left. I don’t think I’ll ever work for a big corp again, I actually like my work so much more now.
At work I’m expected to use it, our clients want it, my boss likes that he can feel technical when writing tickets (they’re mostly wrong though, and the tickets solution instead of report and request). It genuinely can do some useful tasks that make sense to use it for.
There are real pros and cons, but there’s no putting this back in the bottle. Philosophically I do hate it and everything it stands for, but practically it has allowed me to do a lot that I couldn’t (and wouldn’t) before.
The only good solution I’ve found is that you have to get your hands dirty and stay in the weeds. You cannot let it run off and do what it wants, you have to drive and then tag it in. When you vibe code something you’ll find yourself in three weeks resolving an issue and going “wait, it does what?!”, and of course, arguing with the gibberish Claude or GPT claims is English but is actually the first stage of model collapse as the models reinforcement train on ever more distilled data. Plus, skill atrophy is real. Decide which skills to allow to atrophy carefully.
AI code review is good and useful. I used to use it as a first wave for obvious stuff, but it is actually decent and high trust now. Saves me some time on that.
It’s good at finding bugs and security issues, and one thing I actually really like is having it model a system as a state machine and enumerate all the possible states to find bugs — especially concurrency bugs. I don’t work in a provable language, so this is hugely helpful.
I would be very hesitant to take a role where they push vibe coding or “agentic fleets” or loops or whatever. If you’re babysitting 6 Claude code sessions you aren’t working and you’re not in the loop on any of them. That will accumulate as tech debt and bog you down over time. It’ll suck your soul dry. It’s miserable.
Reading the slop and reviewing it “software factory” style is a very bad sign to me.
Some code is throwaway or disposable, vibing that makes sense to me. But the core work is more important than ever. Maybe the disposable code is the new part, I look at it like installing an IKEA kitchen, it’s slop, but it looks nice, the important part is the foundation and level flooring that enables the slop to stand up.
arguing with the gibberish Claude or GPT claims is English
You’re right to push back on that – I’ve been using Claudish the whole time and this actually changes everything. If we use English instead, each one of these comments could be a single, concise line. One thing worth knowing: This is not a minor boost to understanding, but a complete game changer. Understanding my bullshit has been gated behind speaking LLMese.
Nah, really, I’ve been able to get fairly decent code out of the newer models since I work with a very popular language. Not one-shotted of course, but after some change requests or manual changes. But the language these models speak (including the Chinese ones, it seems) is infuriating and they seem to insist on tons of super long comments in places where the code itself feels self-explanatory. My philosophy is to write “why” comments, not “how” comments, but not a single model seems to agree with me.
I look at it like installing an IKEA kitchen, it’s slop, but it looks nice
Are IKEA kitchens really that bad? I’ve been looking to remodel my ancient kitchen and it comes to 5-6k EUR, appliances included (minus the fridge, I upgraded that a while ago), from IKEA. If I ask a carpenter to do a proper one, that’s going to be more like 10-20k and I don’t wanna spend that kinda money lol
