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…).
It’s hard to be a contrarian in these kinds of positions (I’ve been there, and it didn’t end well), so I wouldn’t be too outspoken, but at the same time, try to innocently point out the issues with approaches like this. I would just try to point out the flaws in this approach, the same that we would for any other kind of programming fad - without making it seem like it’s an agenda, of course.
For example, any time teams are looking for feedback - code review, retrospectives, etc. - just point out the flaws on why vibe coding is a bad idea and bring it up casually when the time comes. It doesn’t hurt to be honest as long as you don’t come off as being an ass about it.