Programming

But look at all those new fancy job positions. Forward Engineer, AI Enablement Engineer, Prompt Engineer, Applied AI Engineer.

I've seen a colleague write an API interface for support technicians with AI. As he adds to it or makes changes, the AI breaks something somewhere else. When you ask how to do something he struggles to find where it is on the interface. He says it should be in the documentation, but he doesn't know where because he vibe coded the documentation as well. Then when he needs to just incorporate extra devices with the same API it becomes a gauntlet because he's not sure what the AI did for the first set and the new set only gets half the functionality. On top of that, we are running days behind schedule because we spend so much time on debugging it.

If this was done properly from the ground up it would be less messy, have more intent, and it could be a framework for other projects.

I don't have great experiences trying to get LLMs to write code, but I've found it to be incredibly valuable for checking my code for mistakes and oversights. Sure, it will spit out nit picks, false positives, and straight up nonsense, but at a rate that is quite a bit lower than other tools I've used. I not infrequently end up going through a number of iterations, rewriting code and tests based on its feedback, until I'm happy with the code and the LLM no longer points out actual problems.

It probably doesn't help my productivity, in terms of lines of code committed or whatever companies might use, but it certainly helps improve the quality of my work

The problem isn't the tool; it's the lack of engineering foundations. Generalizing all AI-assisted development as 'vibe coding' is a massive oversimplification. There is a vast difference between a beginner blindly copy-pasting LLM output into a codebase they don’t understand, and a senior architect using LLMs as a high-powered assistant to speed up boilerplate, local schema generation, or parsing scripts. When you already know exactly how the underlying system operates, how memory is managed, and how to design clean software architectures, the LLM is just a productivity multiplier. You still design the data flow, audit the tool-use sandboxes, and review every single line of code. It doesn't replace thinking; it replaces tedious typing.

There can be a million papers on how AI is worthless, the vibe coders are way too brainwashed into their shitty habits that they'll never stop. It's basically a sect at this point, but a sect that is destroying the world.

If only there was an entire suite of books by Pragmatic.