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…).
AI is inevitable in many fields but as usual people expect way too much from it. It’s a tool, not a magic wand. I agree with you that it is useful and even powerful when used by somebody that understands when it is useful. But it is dangerous when wielded by somebody that doesn’t. As others have said, let your boss vibe code themselves into a corner and leave them to vibe code themselves out of it. They will try to deflect that it is your job to solve it though so you better come up with a strategy to handle that. Be sure to have more people on your side in this venture.
Secondarily, install a chatbot with the instructions to derive essence as a bullet list from your boss wall of texts. If they make their life easier with LLM, so can you. If there are misunderstandings it’s either all just ghosts in the machine or a failure from your boss to communicate clearly.