> we ask AI to reference that ticket, code to it, and create a PR
> none of them have read any more than a few lines of code
So what do you / your team do?
> none of them have read any more than a few lines of code
So what do you / your team do?
Tools are always made out to seem like the human could be replaced. We've seen that every time some new technology comes out that some people claim will replace humans once and for all! But this does not seem to be true.
What AI coding allows us to do is get rid of just 1 or 2 parts of the job: coding and debugging. The rest of our knowledge based job is still there. AI just speeds things up because I can now ask it to code something while I go help plan or design something with a colleague. Most of us at this workplace also have a very good eye for UI design and system design patterns, so when we prompt/query the AI, we can understand what is happening. That isn't a replacement, that's more like getting a team of engineers who can do different things all in service of a larger goal.
Our conclusion was that we should not be concerned what search or queuing algorithm or data structure is being used. And to be perfectly honest, and I know that this will rub some in the wrong way, a lot of development since the 90s have been around object and graph management. For the 1000th time, I just do not (and most engineers I work with) care how an object is serialized and deserialized. Just display it on a table for me, why are we spending weeks coding a list, adapter, transformer, JSON/XML/whatever, networking calls, networking nuances, etc. etc. when I just want to get our customers seeing that list and move on?
I don't know if I did a good job covering the nuance, AMA!
It seems my definition of "vibe coding" was wrong after all, at least in this case, and that you're still doing design. My initial read was that this was fully AI-powered, and while that sounded interesting, it did leave me wondering what the humans did :)
I also responded below re: Vibe coding.
it’s a shame we automated that instead of the boring system design shit.
The other side considers shipping as a feature.
I can both sympathize and empathize with this conflict.
You mean typing the actual code into the editor is the fun part for you? For me, the fun part has always been "cause computer to do novel things", and actually typing/compiling/debugging the code is just a speed bump on the way to something fun.
the act of typing is trivial and second nature, like breathing. but going e2e from brain to keyboard to editor to working product..that’s the thrill. and it’s dead.
See also debates between high/low level languages.
You might as well say “real men/women only write Asm”.
- Yes, yes that's right.
- Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the vibe coding software people?
- Well, I'll tell you why... because... engineers are not good at dealing with customers...
- So you physically take the specs from the customer?
- Well... No. My secretary does that... or they're faxed.
- So then you must physically bring them to the software people?
- Well... No. ah sometimes.
- What would you say you do here?
- Look I already told you, I deal with the @#$% customers so the prompt engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!
I think I missed where you posted what business you work at
Not to be too snide, but if that's your reductionist view of the work of software development, I'm not surprised you're comfortable vibecoding without a human in the loop.
> We get feature requests, improvements, ideas, feedback
So maybe I misunderstood, but it sounded like the design was external (and based on an existing product to begin with).
Also, my understanding was that "vibe coding" meant more of "make it do X" as opposed to "here's a design for X, implement it."
The design is external in that the requirements come from external customers or internal customers (since these applications) are used by both. We're not trying to duplicate or replicate any existing system, but I can't confidently say that I'm not drawing from any prior art.
Hope that makes sense.
Hopefully soon our industry will align on some standard terms. I feel like "AI-assisted", "agentic coding", "vibe coding", etc each have a few different meanings already.
Obviously I'm not just shipping whatever it spits out, but the frontier models and harnesses are getting so good that I'm definitely not checking everything it does or all of its reasoning
There's also certain features of an application that most of us engineers know how it works or how to do it, but it is just so painful to do it by hand. Or other features that you've always wanted because you saw another app do it and it was beautifully done and you can just "have" that feature in your app too.
The joy is in seeing the feature come alive, not so much in fighting the computer.
This is so funny to me, because I know it's asked in earnest but seems so obvious to me:
They get actual work done.
Programming isn't work. That's just a means to an end. A tool to get the actual job done.
At least in most orgs. Obviously there are exceptions - but the vast economy is not a bunch of software companies. It's companies doing things to build a physical product, and software is a relatively new annoying side quest/cost center.
I meant - create useful work product. For most companies software is a means to an end. The programmer writing code isn’t useful, it’s the end result. A lot of small to midsize companies employ a couple software guys out of necessity, and the results are usually middling at best. It’s a problem IT in general has really failed to solve very well.
I say this as someone who has picked up and put down “programming” as I needed it. It’s never been something I’ve gotten any satisfaction out of by doing, but I get huge satisfaction out of the resulting product or workflow automation or whatnot.
For my uses, if I could replace my programming and IT time with a robot I would - since me being in that role just slows down delivery to the end user. One of my first hires as a small startup was a programmer - specifically because I knew I rather sucked at it and what a pro could get done in a day took me a week. This is why AI for the low value/less complicated automation tasks is extremely compelling to me.
I’d immediately have 20 other things to work on to soak up the time savings!
That tells us a lot more about the leadership and management philosophies at modern companies than anything fundamental about what kind of work actually matters.
Perversely I find myself increasingly blaming the growth of product management divorced from engineering as the source of some of this.
Everyone wants to be the next Jobs, but somehow they missed that it was the marriage of high quality design and high quality engineering that got Apple where they are today.
Rather, the lesson they learned is that PMF and UX and yadda yadda yadda are all that matter and coding is just a means to an end.
It'll be interesting to see how many companies discover that you can't achieve those ends if you build on a broken foundation.
Face it - it's because developers are annoying princesses. Just read your comment again.
My entitled friend was whining AI will start monitoring his work and he won't be able to slack as much as he does now. Basically he'll have to work like everyone else. FFS.
Which is a perfect parallel to coders who don't realize that coding is a distraction. When your job depends on you not understanding something, etc
That said, I do see a lot of those posts you're talking about, and I think a lot of AI development is way overhyped. But I also think internal tools like this can be a good use case.
Personally "none of them have read any more than a few lines of code" makes me wary, but if it works for them, then so be it!
This conversation feels like the "disturbance in the kitchen" scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjaHrp6JtyY
Probably the hard part; figuring out what the heck to actually build, talking to customers, and figuring out whether it's actually working for people.
Nobody cares that your codebase is Clean and SOLID, or uses $whatever_framework of the day with 100% test coverage.
However, the poster explicitly said they don't do what you said (EDIT: I misinterpreted some of these):
RE "talking to customers"
> We get feature requests, improvements, ideas, feedback. JIRA tickets get created, and we ask AI to reference that ticket, code to it, and create a PR
RE "figuring out whether it's actually working for people"
> have senior engineers review the actual functionality and none of them have read any more than a few lines of code
RE "figuring out what the heck to actually build"
> replaced by "vibe" coding
Maybe my definition of vibe coding is wrong?
--
In any case, I don't have some ulterior anti- or pro-AI motive. I'm genuinely curious why and how a project run this way has humans in the loop at all.
We ultimately decided that paying for low code/no code platforms was pointless because that's what AI coding is. 90% of the time, we don't even have VS Code open and just gloss over the diffs in the PR.
I honestly don't know what the trajectory of those low code/no code platforms are going to look like. Are their senior strategists looking at the landscape in the last year and going "oh. no. What is the point of our product anymore because what's the point of people dragging and dropping no-code connectors to build an application when they can get 100% portability and transparency by having code generated by AI"
- user experience/expectation (i.e., if feature X worked three years ago, it still works in a consistent way today after a bug fix) - development cadence (if implementation of feature X took N days, a comparable feature Y should take N days) - sanity (can we assume that a fix going in Thursday night or Friday morning doesn’t wreck the weekend)
SOLID, DRY, ACID-compliant, linted, formatted, clean, functional, compositional, etc. May be the means (misdirected or otherwise) but they are not the motivator(or at least should not be).
What matters is whether the day two feature requests, bug reports, CVEs, and traffic load that are coming can be met on time.
Not saying it can’t be done without a developer at the helm, Anyone Can Cook™, but I guess it depends on what harness is in use or has created for the org, and whether that consideration is baked into the guidelines for the codebase (which seems to be, at least to some extent, what this service tries to course correct).
And of course, what is done to the process when incident x happens, again and again. Are we only updating code without paying attention to process that enabled it in the first place?
Maybe that’s the story of vibe coded repos: the code devs were removed but we really still need devops personnel. Also maybe new tech will be more readily adopted.
Interesting times.