I’m a software developer in Germany and work for a small company.
I’ve always liked the job, but I’m getting annoyed recently about the ideas for certain people…
My boss (who has some level of dev experience) uses “vibe coding” (as far as I know, this means less human review and letting an LLM produce huge code changes in very short time) as a positive word like “We could probably vibe-code this feature easily”.
Someone from management (also with some software development experience) makes internal workshops about how to use some self-built open-code thing with “memory” and advanced thinking strategies + planning + whatever that is connected to many MCP servers, a vector DB, has “skills”, a higher token limit, etc. Surprisingly, the people visiting the workshops (also many developers, but not only) usually end up being convinced by it and that it improved their efficiency a lot and writing that they will use it and that it changed their perspective.
Our internal slack channels contain more and more AI-written posts, which makes me think: Thank you for throwing this wall of text on me and n other people. Now, n people need to extract the relevant information, so you are able to “save time” not writing the text yourself. Nice!!!
I see Microsoft announcing that 30% of code is written by AI which is advertisement in my opinion and an attempt to pressure companies to subscribe to OpenAI. Now, my company seems to not even target that, but target the 100%???
To be clear: I see some potential for AI in software development. Auto-completions, location a bug in a code base, writing prototypes, etc. “Copilot” is actually a good word, because it describes the person next to the pilot. I don’t think, the technology is ready for what they are attempting (being the pilot). I saw the studies questioning how much the benefit of AI actually is.
For sure, one could say “You are just a developer fearing to lose their job / lose what they like to do” and maybe, that’s partially true… AI has brought a lot of change. But I also don’t want to deal with a code base that was mainly written by non-humans in case the non-humans fail to fix the problem…
My current strategy is “I use AI how and when ->I<- think that it’s useful”, but I’m not sure how much longer that will work…
Similar experiences here? What do you suggest? (And no, I’m currently not planning to leave. Not bad enough yet…).
Let me give you a little parable.
There once was a juggler, who could juggle with three balls all day. Then someone from the audience threw a fourth ball, and he kept going. Someone threw a glass, then a flaming torch, and he kept going, occasionally burning his hands. Seeing he could do it, someone throws a machete, and the juggler almost never cuts his fingers keeping all those things in the air. A chainsaw gets added, and an open bottle of bleach, and occasionally the juggler gets his hair caught or spills some bleach, but he keeps going. As he keeps going, people keep adding more and more things. Eventually it’s too much, and it all comes crashing down, killing the juggler and several members of the audience and destroying all the objects in the air.
On the next street corner, a juggler stands with three balls. Someone from the audience throws in a fourth. He steps aside and lets it fall to the floor, happily juggling three balls.
I fail to see the relevance. OP is not talking about burn-out…
The point was that the more you keep compensating for other people’s dumb moves, the greater the damage when it all inevitably comes crashing down.
In other words, just do what they ask, get them to sign off on it and watch it crash and burn in an unmaintainable, unsecured mess
Reading a wall of text to extract a simple concept which turns it to be wrong seems very appropriate for this thread, just perhaps not in the way they intended.