Hey now, there’s a lot of Hello World, Mandelbrots and Ugly Tailwind Dashboards too :o)

Great point about web3. People always talk about during gold rushes, selling shovels instead of being the ones digging for gold. And it might be a reasonable idea, but there needs to be actual people getting rich from the gold to be an actual gold rush, if everyone is just selling shovels, it is probably a sign of a bubble.

Not really no. ChatGPT is used by 100s of millions of people directly and not for creating more AI apps like web3. So it is nothing like web3.

You may have seen headlines about this paper, which found that while most devs (apparently) feel like AI makes them 20% faster, they’re actually 20% SLOWER with it: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Yup, entirely gave up on AI as a result, and it didn't help that reviewing and fixing AI code made me incredibly bored to the point that if this somehow becomes the new norm of development, I'll have to find a new career, because I want to actually build things, not manage AI.

Not a dev but I’ve had similar experiences testing AI to help me craft various documents.

I spend ages crafting the perfect prompt only to cross my fingers and hope that the output is what I want it to be when I could have just spent all that time actually crafting the document exactly as I want it to be in the first place. Often I then need to spend more time editing and tweaking the output from the AI anyway.

I’m honestly starting to feel a little crazy because I’m the only one at my workplace that sees it this way.

Absolutely, much harder to describe what I want the software to do in English than logical programming language, and then add to that the time taken to understand the code and make sure it does what was intended. Perhaps the worst part, takes the joy out of it all.

It is nice as a tool to help solve some hairy stuff sometimes.

I usually find this to be the case with an existing codebase, unless I'm doing something extremely generic.

It's just really hard to convert requirements to English when there are a bunch of land mines in there that you know how to avoid.

I find it depends. I just "vibe coded" (I hate this phrase) a simple mobile app for something I needed, without writing a line or code, or indeed ant knowledge of any web/mobile technology. No way realistically I would spend a few days learning Flutter then a few more writing my app.

3. Hire more developers to decode / devibe code, paying double in the end.

I don't think this behavior has anything to do with AI although it seems like it's been used as an excuse to justify it. Everyone seems to be in a belt-tightening risk averse mode right now and that means cutting junior positions and leaning on smaller teams of senior staff. You can see this behavior in more than just tech and more than just positions that can be replaced by AI. The job boards betray it as well, job postings for junior staff have dried up.

1. Replace junior developers with AI, reducing costs today.

2. ?

3. Profit!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts

It worked with COBOL.

you'll be retired by 3, good luck kids

At least your two year old learns.

I was going to point out that what you are describing is exactly like what it is to be a leader/director of people working in most efforts, i.e., managing people, when it occurred to me that maybe what we are dealing with in this conflict and mud slinging around AI is the similar conflict of coders not wanting to become managers as they are often even not really good at being managers. Devs work well together at a shared problem solving (and even that often only sometimes), but it strikes me as the same problem as when devs are forced to become managers and they really don't like it, they hate it even, sometimes even leaving their company for that reason.

When you are working with AI, you are effectively working with a group of novice people, largely with basic competence, but lacking many deeper skills that are largely developed from experience. You kind of get what you put into it with proper planning, specificity in requests/tasks, proper organization based on smart structuring of skillsets and specializations, etc.

This may ruffle some feathers, but I feel like even though AI has its issues with coding in particular, this issue is really a leadership question; lead and mentor your AI correctly, adequately, and appropriately and you end up with decent, workable outcomes. GIGO

Yeah, sounds about like babysitting a toddler.

LLMs aren’t deterministic even with a seed.

I sure wish I could tell if this is a joke or not.

random example, may or may not come from a real situation that just happened:

    - other team opens jira ticket requesting a new type of encabulator
    - random guy who doesn't know anything of how the current encabulator system works picks up the ticket for whatever reason
    - 10 minutes later opens a 2000 line vibe coded pr with the new encabulator type and plenty of unit tests
    - assigns ticket to the person who designed the current encabulator system for review
    - encabulator system designer finds out about this ticket for the first time this way
    - "wait wtf what is this?  why are we doing any of this?  the current system is completely generic and it takes arbitrary parameters?"
    - waste an hour talking to the guy and to the team that requested this
    - explain they could just use the parameters, close pr and ticket

> Does it end up like having colleagues who are aren't doing or understanding or learning from their own work, and are working like they offshored their job to an overnight team of juniors, and then just try to patch up the poor quality, before doing a pull request and calling their sprint done?

yes

> working like they offshored their job to an overnight team of juniors

Reviewing a co-worker of 13 years now gives me the exact same unpleasant feeling as opening an MR from a junior where I know it's going to be garbage and I'm tired of struggling to let them down easy.

Patch up?

Had our junior dev working on a case actually ran the code in the merge request and looked at the result, it would have been obviously broken and unusable. Like not even wrong value, it would have spewed a bunch of HTML into the page.

Exactly this, if you're babysitting the AI, you are, by definition, _not_ vibe coding. Vibe coding means not reading the resulting code, and accepting that things will break down completely in four or five iterations.

Brother most of them ain't even assisting. Management just forces it.

I insta reject. It’s ridiculous how bad it’s made some devs. Are they even testing their work before tossing over the wall?

I've got some receipts for what I think is good vibe coding...

I save every prompt and associated ai-generated diff in a markdown file for a steganography package I'm working on.

Check out this document: https://github.com/sutt/innocuous/blob/master/docs/dev-summa...

In particular, under v0.1.0 see `decode-branch.md` prompt and it's associated generated diff which implements memoization for backtracking while performing decoding.

It's a tight PR that fits the existing codebase and works well, you just need a motivating example you can reproduce which can help me you quickly determine if the proposed solution is working. I usually generate 2-3 solutions initially and then filter them quickly based on a test case. And as you can see from the prompt, it's far from well formatted or comprehensive, just "slap dash" listing of potentially relevant information similar to what would be discussed at an informal whiteboard session.

Hold up, people are starting to mark PRs with [vibe] as in “I don’t stand behind this, good luck.” ??

I do not care if engineers on my team are using AI. In fact, I think they should be. This is the new world and we need to get used to it.

But it’s still your work, your responsibility. You still have to own it. No cop outs.

We need to normalize to reject crap PRs. If we don't then things will only continue.

lol if I saw a teammember create a PR with "[vibe]" in the title I would: 1) Gape in disbelief 2) Shout obscenities as loud as I can 3) Take a deep breath 4) reject the PR and seriously consider firing them.

Yeah "consider firing" is a bit of an extreme kneejerk reaction, but I just feel like we HAVE to create consequences for this nonsense.

Recently in that exact situation.

Junior dev vibe codes some slop to solve a problem that was barely a problem. The "solution" to that not-a-problem was 2500 lines of slop. Unused variables, spaghetti logic, unit tests that were clearly write-once, read-never.

The slop at that point is the meta-problem, the real problem becomes me trying to convince (through multiple rounds of code review) that this was not maintainable code, and not a tenable development model.

All those rounds of review take TIME and mental effort. At some point, when the code review takes more effort than the code owner contributed, the value proposition is shot.

Generate the code however you want (llm, bit twiddling, whatever), but the effort and care must be there. If you can't use an llm skillfully and vouch for the output, it's gonna be a no from me dawg

> and find 400 lines of obviously incorrect slop

I call that a good day. I've seen people push 2000 line PRs. The worst was 5000 lines. FML.

Have your own agent do first pass code reviews, they catch that stuff every time.

IMO the best possible outcome of this AI hype is better documentation.

It's proven that (agentic) LLMs work better and more efficiently when they have the proper context for the project (AGENT(S).md), the documentation is accessible and up to date (docs/ directory with proper up to date markdown) and the tooling is smooth (git hooks that prevent secrets from being pushed, forced style checking and linting).

...surprise! All of this makes things easier for actual humans too!

Don’t most of these tools create them for you? Just run “/init” and the AI makes the initial agents.md file.

Dunno how helpful that is, but they shouldn’t have to write it from scratch.

I love maintaining my agent file. Yeah, it doesn’t always listen to the instructions, but neither does anyone else.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-universit...

Regarding point 1 - when you say "a few minutes," I'm wondering if we're talking about the same thing? I spent two solid months with Claude Max, before they imposed limits, running multiple Opus agents, and never once got anywhere close to "weeks of work" from a single prompt. Not even in the same zip code.

So I'm genuinely asking: could you pretty please share one of these prompts? Just one. I'd honestly prefer discovering I can't prompt my way out of a paper bag rather than facing the reality that I wasted a bucketload of time and money chasing such claims.

A few minutes crafting a prompt to save weeks

Thats like a 2000x productivity boost. AI is amazing

Not sure I agree with 3.

I can have Claude write stuff that does basically the right thing and actually works but, as so many people say, it's like working with a junior dev. The only way I'm going to get code I'd want to present as my own is by sitting looking over their shoulder and telling them what to do constantly, and with a junior dev and with Claude (etc) that takes longer than just writing it myself.

AI-coded/assisted work should be flagged as such so everyone knows that it needs extra scrutiny. If we decided to let a horde of junior devs loose on a codebase we'd naturally pay more attention to PRs from new intern Jimmy than revered greybeard Bob and we shouldn't let Claude hide behind Bob's username.

The meaning has changed very quickly for some reason, but I think the original meaning was that you evaluate the result in a superficial manner by checking if the program seems to work fine. So "vibe" here is as opposed to any methodical or formal approach. No code review etc.

It comes from people not checking the results thoroughly and taking a YOLO approach to it.

Coined by Andrej Karpathy

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