Early Observations from Interviews with Engineering Teams Adopting AI
jonathannen.com
jonathannen.com
I dunno, I vibe code a ton. But I’m not in the product path.
Today I spent all day interacting with a _very_ popular AI native SAAS tools admin panel, and it was _awful_. It looks beautiful, but in the past 24 hours it deleted my entire config, the data model is unintelligible the UI has all sorts of quirks that cause it to misfire, and trying to re—add the config it added was flaky. When I say the data model was unintelligible, like it conflated the idea of a user and a team and you literally couldn’t tell which you were interacting with, and if you were changing your own settings or the settings across the organization.
So I don’t know if we need code craftsmanship again where every line of code is specially placed, but like vibe coding straight to production is having extremely predictable results. How went from a world from careful incremental change management, where the lines of code were never the bottleneck! To full speed ahead, fuck it.
The problem is that I think it affects your culture. We’re inherently valuing a culture that values speed over everything. I don’t hear hardly anyone talking about deploying safely, or change management, it’s ALL speed now. And I want speed! But like we used to casually glance towards discipline.
Were in for the golden age of cyberattacks, let me tell you.
As a counterpoint -- it's rare I've seen a new UX issue fixed with a PR.
If you valued quality you could feature-flag some different improvements, get feedback and refine. AI is great at this. We have CS directly submitting Pull Requests now... and they're not junk, 95% of the the time they want things fixed/correct. And it's stuff that usually would sit on the backlog forever. The quality has gone up.
Your experience is representative I'm sure - but I do think there is a way to get this right and those that do will see a big upside.
> Were in for the golden age of cyberattacks, let me tell you.
Agree in full there.
But I do think there’s something inherent in the nature of reducing friction that can make it hard to add some back.