Programming

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.

In the future there will be a huge job market for un-vibing code bases, I guarantee it

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.

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.

I'm not sure if it stays like that, after the ~~managers~~ executives realize there isn't any huge productivity increase as promoted... They're already in the process of learning about cost of tokens... But as of now, that's how it is for a lot of programmers.

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.

It's normalized now but I don't see it lasting. I'm retiring at the end of this year cause I've had enough of it and I don't want to wait anymore for companies to finally figure it out. I've told so many what needs to change, what they need to do in order to fix their builds (mainly consisting of rebuild it, rehire the devs you laid off, use AI as a rubber duck only) and none of them listen. They thank me for my time, cut a cheque, and send me on my way. I had the idiotic notion of trying to change things, hopefully make some people see the light but they've all drunk the kool-aid and have all pushed all their poker chips in and are currently hoping it works out. it won't.

Any dev worth their salt can look at what's been produced and everything is garbage. everything. I've yet to meet a single developer of any level that has looked at something that's been vibe coded and said "hey, that's not bad!" It's all crap. the ONLY things that would ever work is if the AI somehow managed to churn something out to be 100% complete and working on the first attempt. something that will never need to be upgraded or scaled or something that would never interact with the user space. Name me something that does that.

The issue as it stands right now is it's taking too long to fail. it will fail, I guarantee you that, but it's taking too long. Developers and programmers and engineers can't wait anymore. They're not keeping their skills up because many just don't see a point. Many have been unemployed from the field for so long now they've taken different career paths. We're simply losing developers due to time.

It should have happened by now, should have happened months ago. the gaps in training data are increasing. you get way more hallucinations than solutions. the tool is absolutely worthless but the problem is the people utilizing the tool don't know any of this. thus token use increases.

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.

I'm being migrating all my team code from SAS to Python from the past year or so, slowly but firmly. Another team went full on on vibe coding their SAS to Python and now I'm being told that I'm being move to their team to refractor all that vibe code because the results are incorrect and nobody understands what the vibe code is doing. I checked up quickly to know what I'm going to find and the Claude Code just translate the SAS code as is, instead of adapting the code as python practices (for example, to get the last day of the month the code goes to the first day of the next month, but first it check it December to go to the next year, and then subtracts a day, instead of using relativedelta).

Work at a saas company in silicon valley, pretty much all the code being written is from an LLM here. Everything is still reviewed by humans, and a bunch of rounds of LLM reviews as well though.

Productivity has gone up as far as I can tell, we are shipping more features with a smaller staff. Support cases also seem to be going down, at least ones that reach an engineer like me since a lot are being resolved earlier in the escalation chain by a support technician, or just the customer talking to the built in helper LLM in the product.

Our token spend is pretty high though, looking like I'm at $1,200 on the month so far, so there's that but don't hear to many complaints from the finance department yet...

I'm liking the transition, as I have less work now. My day is a lot more waiting on the AI to complete a task or waiting for a human reviewer to do a pass on the code so I can spend more of my time doing important things, like scrolling on lemmy.

As for the future, I don't think this is going away as much as everyone else in this thread seems to be wish casting for that to happen. The coding agents and models are only getting better, and tokens will only get cheaper as the data centers come on line. Long term I've been looking into becoming an electrician, but for now the economics don't make sense with my current salary, so sticking with it until they lay me off...

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.

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.

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.

What you described is not vibe coding. Vibe coding is when you don't read the code.

I don't think it is like that everywhere though it is like that far too many places. I'm hopeful eventually people will realize it is unsustainable and reach an equilibrium where the usage will be less harmful, though we can't say it'll happen for sure or how long it will take if it does.

The fact everyone is listening to people saying it's rocket fuel that aren't the people who actually held the cart together in the before times is maddening, and it is equally maddening that the best devs have extra work mitigating the damage while it is essentially invisible and demoralizing work.

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.

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'm still designing and writing all code by hand. I don't know that any of my coworkers are and know that many definitely are not. Our company does have copilot reviews built into CI and, at least for now, requires human review as well.

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.

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.

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.