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.
AI came at sort of a perfect time for me. I grew very tired of coding about, I don’t know, 5 or 10 years ago. No LLM in sight back then.
Now that I can do “coding” without the absolute bore of the process, I’m much happier. I find that I can accomplish projects that I have been dreaming about for decades.
Models keep getting better and cheaper. I can now drive the pretty capable Deepseek v4.1 flash pretty much 24h a day on my projects while spending something like 20 euros per month.
The jobs I have had over the last year have been heavily pushing it, yes.
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.
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.
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.
I think I’ll use this answer to reflect. So first, vibe coding means, to me anyway, taking w/e the ai spits at you without checking/understanding. Aside from that, like okay, check the code send the PR. But anyway, at one point in my life, I thought, hey it would be great to go from writing code to reviewing code by others. I thought that would be a stepping stone for me. After a carefully thought, that’s what ai code gen is in the end. One of those careful what you wish for kind of thing.
I do think LLM is here to stay, one way or another. Might be like the next compiler like a comment suggested. I also do think that any software developer/engineer is stronger candidate with AI than one who rejects it.
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.
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.
people who can suddenly “”“make”“” things like minecraft mods are also a part of those celebrating, though i assume they’re a lot less vocal about it
and god i wish that was all it was used for
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s a good point. At the moment, I don’t have solutions besides not using the major Macroslop sourceforge, because they are heavily promoting the use of AI and knowing how they operate, it’s only going to get worse. Codeberg, Gitlab, Radicle, etc. might be temporarily safe until federation is implemented and another solution will have to be found.
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’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.
This is an interesting take. Thanks for sharing. I think this is a part of why many people avoid proprietary and corporate software.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Upvoted because I want it to be true
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.
Ok, UI coding is messy either way.
I am a technician in the physics department for a major university. There are quick and dirty hardware hacks that I threw together 2 decades ago that are still in daily use. Quickly made mildly broken tools have a habit of lingering.
That’s exactly how a webpage that displays an excel spreadsheet nicely in different tables, turned into a gigantic monster of a project that nobody fully understand at my workplace.
Well, kinda, because that was BEFORE ai. I can’t even imagine what mockery of God himself they would have done with AI in their hands.
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.
Yeah well they were wrong IMO.
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.
I dunno about Sol but Anthropic models at least are waaay slower (at least x2) and also write that really annoying AI prose - it’s not this, it’s that, and so on. Astra doesn’t do that, or at least not enough to be annoying.
Sol is pretty fast from my experience, but still does the same thing that everything before it did: generate plausible code that I need to correct (and often rewrite) afterwards.
I haven’t used Astra yet, but I don’t really expect it to change that. Once it becomes available at work, I’ll give it a shot of course, but my expectations aren’t very high.
Edit: turns out I have Astra at work. It meets my expectations. I’ve had to rewrite a bunch of test code it generated and point it to the docs for a library to show it that some methods were deprecated and soon to be removed.
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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.
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?
What can you do that someone with six weeks (or less) of training can’t?
AI seems to be killing opportunities for entry level engineers. Hiring and interviewing processes I’ve been involved with or observed in the last ~2 years have greatly favored experienced engineers, just less of them. I’m gonna do my damndest to adapt, network, and remain in that bracket.
just less of them
That’s not a trivial problem. There will still be some programmers, but everyone will be competing for a shrinking number of jobs.
That’s not a future with a stable career. That’s a future where you’re going to have to fight for the rest of your life to keep a job.
Unless the LLM hype craze dies down and they realize “oh actually we can’t replace people yet” and they start hiring again.
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 you work for a company that prioritizes profit over quality - yes.
I no longer work in government IT, but from what I have heard from old colleagues, quality is still prioritized there and they are not forced to vibe code.
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
IKEA kitchens are great?! We’ve had ours for a long time now. And even moved once and took the kitchen with us. It’s easier to assemble than their competition, the surface of my cupboards has higher quality than some other kitchens I’ve seen. There’s no silly salesman in the process who tells you it’s 17,000€ but you get a special discount and only need to pay 10,000€ if you order it today… You can just grab additional cabinets 12 years later…
I didn’t buy the appliances at IKEA, though. And I found nicer alternatives for the sink, plumbing,
countertopworktop as well. But the rest is from IKEA and I’m A-okay. Also like my IKEA wardrobe.Only downside is if you don’t assemble it yourself. I had a look at their price table for assembling it, and that service was a bit expensive, I think. At least where I live.
And even moved once and took the kitchen with us.
For anyone confused, this is common in some parts of the world. Taking your entire kitchen with you to a new home is a thing.
And yeah, appliances aside, IKEA has great countertops, cabinets, and so on.
Yes. I mean it doesn’t have to be like that. You’re also allowed to (try to) sell the kitchen to the next person. But the landlords usually don’t want to be bothered with the upkeep, fix appliances or get insurance in case the plumbing floods your stuff. So they regularly just provide people with the walls, heating… And since it’s a bit difficult to move the loo, the bathroom will be okay and contain a toilet, shower and sink including faucets 😅
And turns out I misspoke. I meant I got a worktop at some other place, not the entire countertop.
I think IKEA has different price points
The ones installed when I moved in were those cheap particle board counter tops and cabinets, so when my dishwasher leaked everything expanded and cracked and can never be fixed. A real wood or high quality MDF would have been okay with a one time water event (if dried properly)
It stood up for years, worked fine, wasn’t awful. Just was cheap and not resilient.
Absolutely hate the “how”, that’s comment garbage.
But it perfectly matches what you’d get in annotated data or intro medium blog style writing.
I actually like my work so much more now.
You hiring any managers? 😅
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.
Could you elaborate on that at all, finding bugs with a state machine approximating the system, how does that work?
In the future there will be a huge job market for un-vibing code bases, I guarantee it
What, future. There’s already plenty of “vibe code cleanup specialist” job postings.
Sounds like a burnout speedrun tho.
My hunch as well. I’m not certain though. And I’m not going to be miserable for an unspecified number of years waiting for the shit to hit the fan.
