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.

  • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    8 days ago

    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.

  • nightlily@leminal.space
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    9 days ago

    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.

    • luciole (he/him)@beehaw.orgOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      7 days ago

      “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”?

    • annoying_cyclist@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      9 days ago

      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.

      • Phunter@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 days ago

        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.

        • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          8 days ago

          I hate tdd. But this is what happened and now I am so glad they birthed that unholy methodology

    • gingersight@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      8 days ago

      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.

    • bretton.dev@coves.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 days ago

      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.

    • for_some_delta@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      9 days ago

      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.

    • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      8 days ago

      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?

      • nightlily@leminal.space
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        8 days ago

        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.

    • onlinepersona@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 days ago

      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.

      • nightlily@leminal.space
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        9 days ago

        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.

        • onlinepersona@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          9 days ago

          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.

          • nightlily@leminal.space
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            9 days ago

            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.

    • Balinares@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 days ago

      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.

    • dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      9 days ago

      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.

    • timochka@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      9 days ago

      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.

      • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        8 days ago

        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

        • timochka@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          8 days ago

          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.

          • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            10 hours ago

            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.

            • timochka@lemmy.zip
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              4 hours ago

              I have literally no idea what you’re trying to say. But I’m happy for you, though. Or sorry that happened.

  • Cryxtalix@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    8 days ago

    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.

  • Wiz@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • timochka@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      8 days ago

      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.

  • arisunz@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    10 days ago

    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.

    • MrLLM@ani.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      9 days ago

      keep your skills sharp and persevere. we’ll get through this.

      We’ll be the next generation that writes malware no one can stop

    • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      10 days ago

      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.

      • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        10 days ago

        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.

      • risai@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        10 days ago

        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.

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        10 days ago

        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.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          9 days ago

          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?

        • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          10 days ago

          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.

    • [object Object]@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      10 days ago

      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.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        10 days ago

        Careful. You know how it goes with temporary workarounds? Suddenly, you find yourself maintaining slightly broken load-bearing slop.

        • [object Object]@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          10 days ago

          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.

            • dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              9 days ago

              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.

  • Akuchimoya@startrek.website
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • timochka@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      8 days ago

      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.

  • katze@lemmy.4d2.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    9 days ago

    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.

    • PokerChips@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      9 days ago

      Vibe coding is fart coding whether you checked it or not. You still cheated and you didn’t use your own cognitive utilities…

        • PokerChips@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          9 days ago

          That was more of a royal “you” because I think we’ve all been guilty of it by now.

          I don’t know who wrote the rules but I don’t think we should not be calling people vibe coders just because they reviewed it. That’s resetting us under a dystopian playbook.

          • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            9 days ago

            I think your initial criticism is too easy to refute. If someone wants to criticize me for using LLMs because they’re bad for the environment or because they’re built on stolen IP, sure we can have that more nuanced discussion.

            But telling me that I’m “cheating and I didn’t use my own cognitive utilities” – you have no idea how I use LLMs. You’re just assuming that I’m putting zero critical thought into the code I’m submitting. I review every line of code I submit, regardless of whether it was generated by LLM, written by hand, or a combination of both. And it is a laborious task; but my labor is more focused on decision making and designing tests than typing and fighting a compiler.

            I haven’t measured my productivity in any meaningful way, so I won’t try to argue that LLMs are strictly more productive. That’s a separate discussion. All I can say is that I prefer the workflow where I can describe my thoughts in natural language and then review generated code more than writing the code myself.

            • chloroken@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              9 days ago

              Lmao the last line in this comment is literally you admitting you prefer avoiding to use your brain to code.

              AI slop mfers will literally write a book in defense of their AI use and then go “but yeah, I actually do suck” at the end.

  • ragas@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    8 days ago

    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.

  • mildseason@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    8 days ago

    Vibe coding means giving an LLM access to the entire repository and blindly accepting the very large pull requests it makes after you tell it what you want.

    That is an insane way to do development and any company who does it will suffer.

    What is becoming normal is AI assisted programming. The developer retains understanding of the codebase and uses an LLM to generate small boilerplate sections because it’s quicker than writing everything by hand.

    Using LLMs to write code is perfectly acceptable as long as there is a human understands exactly what the code does. Do not give agency to the AI and you’ll be fine. Let it make decisions for you and you’ll be out of the job pretty quickly.

  • benjirenji@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    9 days ago

    I read a retrospective from another team yesterday. They were preparing a demo for leadership and apparently it didn’t go so well. There were many reasons like last minute changes in requirements but one line was interesting for this discussion: The use of the LLM agents caused confusion about who is fixing which bug and taking on which tasks. The agents act like they’re alone in the codebase and keep adding and changing code broadly whenever they see an opportunity for improvement. And that often without specifically being prompted to do so. Now if you have multiple team members collaborating on a project with each their agents, chaos ensues because the agents are not coordinating and the diffs/commits become insane and the team doesn’t fully understand them.

    This actually results in a necessity to test more and longer because nobody knows which bugs have really been fixed now and rapidly preparing for a release or a demo becomes more difficult than before.

    In my opinion an LLM can be very useful to rapidly prototype something. Especially with an API or language you’re not familiar with. But for Production it’s still a huge risk to push code you don’t understand.

  • Balinares@pawb.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    9 days ago

    From what I can observe, yeah, pretty much the entire industry has shifted to LLM code generation. I’m sure (or at least I hope) there are still some shops that go out of their way to keep working like we did, you know, months ago. But beyond that… I’m not even sure the general public understands how quickly and how fully LLM codegen has become the norm. It’s grim.

  • slag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    9 days ago

    I’m a systems architect who uses agentic coding to get around some executive dysfunction challenges with writing my own code. I learned about the dysfunction late in life; maybe meds will eventually get me to a point where I can consistently work on a personal code project without a looming deadline or social contract in the loop. For now I am part of the problem. Hi!

    I look at agentic coding as a firearms problem:

    • it lowers the barrier to execution: anyone with sloppy aim can point and pull the trigger, and do a lot of harm in the process
    • both perform better in the hands of people with discipline and experience, but that doesn’t change the fact that LLMs and guns have massively proliferated and any idiot can get their hands on one (or that shitty people benefit from mass producing them)
    • the industrial complex producing guns profits from murder, and the industrial complex producing datacenters profit from murder of the environment and attempts to eliminate jobs
    • the same countries who treat gun control as an anathema tend to view “AI” controls as an anathema
    • analogies suck, they’re never perfect but they get the conversation started

    That said, most of the people who hate LLMs also don’t know a damn thing about how they’re used correctly. It’s also not their fault. Sure, they’re under no obligation to be an expert about the thing that’s harming them. But there’s a bigger reason: the companies pushing this shit benefit from a world stage where people use them wastefully and inefficiently.

    The short list of things most people don’t get:

    Spoiler'd because most people also won't give a fuck.
    • A LLM is like a ten year old with a doctorate who wants to impress you. It can answer random trivia off the top of its head, but it’s going to make shit up when it doesn’t know the answer.
    • Never trust a LLM answer that was produced without a web search or web fetch. Pretend you’re that obnoxious algebra teacher who rolled their eyes at your calculator and told you to show the work during exams. Work for a LLM is tool calls: web searches and webpage fetches. Tell it to research documentation and best practices before you start. If you don’t, the answer you get will be dated by 1-2 years in the best case, and a confidently wrong hallucination at worst. (unfortunately you’re still at risk of being fucked because frontier labs use webpage summarization in these tool calls, and that summarization adds another vector for hallucinated shit; lovely)
    • The baseline skills of the operator are more important than anyone gives credit. Your results scale to your own knowledge level and your use of the LLM to extend into adjacent subject matter. You’re also the one best equipped to notice when the LLM did something stupid, and the best one to refine the process so that there are fewer stupid outcomes. Employers don’t want to hear this: they want employees to go away. Frontier LLM labs don’t want employers to hear this: they need employers to buy into the delusion of eliminating their work force, and also financially benefit from people using the tools wastefully. (token burn = profit = the heat death of the universe as an afterthought, but that’s the next generation’s problem) Casual LLM critics don’t want to hear this: confidently incorrect echo chambers are the comfort food of anyone with an axe to grind about what they hate.
    • Consistent results require controlling the probability space so that your pipeline swats the hand of the LLM when it’s lazy or generating slop. For coding, that means using languages or tooling that prevent major classes of problems to begin with (Rust, Go, Typescript) or toolchains that bitch about sloppy code (pytest-ruff + pytest-ty for Python). It means extensive unit tests that cover expressions of functionality, and knowledge of how to prompt out bad behaviors. (don’t rewrite tests to conform to “preexisting bugs”, always align tests to higher standards, etc.)

    I could add another ten bullet points here, but I’m not here to prove that LLMs are capable of being useful. I’m here to demonstrate that it requires knowledge of a problem domain to get the best results. That means you can’t get rid of employees familiar with the knowledge domain. You need senior employees to get the best results, and you need junior employees so that they can eventually become senior employees. Same as it ever was. But because we’ve got useless fucking politicians who are too busy lining their own pockets instead of, I don’t know, regulating a worldwide memory shortage caused by a handful of companies, the whole thing is cannibalization of human society all the way down.

    We could have scaled this to operate in the consumer space at a fraction of the energy costs (Apple SOC style versus energy inefficient hyperscaling) and used it as something to generate value by augmenting the capabilities of individual workers instead of trying to replace them wholesale. It only makes sense that it should have benefitted everyone considering this tech was built on shoving libraries worth of human achievement into a training pipeline (often without permission), right?

    Nah. They profit more if we don’t own our own compute and everyone is encouraged to burn energy on treating the LLMs like all-knowing oracles instead of research tooling. They control the access to creations built on stolen knowledge. But hey, if everything else gets burned down in the process at least they come out on the other side rich and bailed out.

  • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    10 days ago

    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.

      • timochka@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        8 days ago

        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.

    • TheAgeOfSuperboredom@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      10 days ago

      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?

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        10 days ago

        I have hand-rolled agents/skills that run through a standardized process:

        1. investigate
        2. plan
        3. execute
        4. self-review
        5. 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.

        • TheAgeOfSuperboredom@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          10 days ago

          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?

          • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            10 days ago

            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.”

    • BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      10 days ago

      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.

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        10 days ago

        You’re not wrong, and to each his own. I’m a workflow and automation nerd, so it’s down my alley personally.

    • luciole (he/him)@beehaw.orgOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      10 days ago

      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.

      • Feyd@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        10 days ago

        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.

        • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          9 days ago

          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.

          • lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            8 days ago

            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.

          • chloroken@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            arrow-down
            4
            ·
            edit-2
            9 days ago

            Wow, you sound insufferable.

            Congratulations on giving up your career, though. I’m sure the “architect” will take care of you.

            • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              9 days ago

              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.