My team has a non-engineer vibe coder who doesn’t know how to even use git, but managed to put together a large application that serves enterprise customers better than the real SWEs we had working on the project.
We’re in the process of porting their code into the main codebase, and it’s obvious to me, not so much them, that there is an insane amount of waste. But I’m not sure whether that’s a bad trade off, the end product works and llms get whatever he needs done.
OTOH, I’m an experienced SWE who is taking a stab at writing dev tooling in rust, which I don’t know and don’t have the time rn to learn. I am very aware there is a lot of waste, the project is obviously moving slower than if I was more involved with design. I was ok with the trade off but I’m growing antsy now.
All to say, it feels to me that vibe coded tech is a viable path so long as you accept what you’re going to get.
The one exception I see rn is when we try to do brownfield work, LLMs get very confused and simply cannot manage an old dog shit human written system with a new set of concepts floating in. Jury is out whether this will also happen with ai slop, but again maybe it just doesn’t matter