Well you're now having to 'coach' an AI into getting it to do what you want rather than a junior employee.

And yes, you need to develop your skills in asking for what you want, whilst still having to review the outputs similar to a junior employee. It just doesn't really learn or get better based on your feedback.

Funny how the article starts with someone using AI — to develop more AI stuff.

This reminds me of web3, where almost all projects were just web3 infrastructure or services, to the point that the purpose of most start-ups was completely inscrutable to outsiders.

I'm having lots more hope for AI though.

As an experienced dev who’s gotten his feet wet a little with AI, I feel like , and does anyone else feel this way, that I spend more time telling AI what to do than it would spend actually writing this all out myself?

Here's the approach I've seen so far at a few startups:

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

2. Wish and hope that senior developers never retire in the future.

3. ?

Vibe Coding is so early 2025, I only check in context, prompt instructions, and seed values to deterministically generate the machine-code.

As someone who spends his non work hours convincing a half baked quasi person to not do dumb things (a two year old), I have zero interest in convincing a half baked quasi person to not do dumb things during work hours (most coding agents).

I’ve had good results with Claude, it just takes too long. I also don’t think I can context switch fast enough to do something else while it’s churning away.

How do the colleagues of people "vibe-coding" feel about that?

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?

Or is it more like competent mechanical grunt work (e.g., "make a customer contact app with a Web form with these fields, which adds a row to the database"), that was always grunt work, and it's pretty hard to mess up, and nothing that normally the person you assigned it to would understand further anyway by doing it themself?

These are the questions I ask engineers now:

Q1. How well do you prompt?

Q2. How reactionary are you to canceling a running prompt as soon as you see a wrong turn?

Q3. How well do you author PRs without ever saying "well AI did that part." Do you own your PRs?

Re: 1. It's a new skill set. Some engineers are not good at it. Some are amazing. And some are out of this world. You can spend a few minutes crafting a prompt that's so thorough, so well thought out but also succinct and to the point. How it touches on all the possible unknowns the AI might have as it works through the task and has direction. An out of this world prompt gets you between 90% and 95% completely done with a task that before AI would take weeks.

Re: 2. You can do very well with the first prompt but the whole other side of this is watching the AI work. Knowing when to watch very closely, and when it's okay to multi-task. Know when you immediately press ESC and tell the AI exactly what you just saw you didn't like. Catching it quickly is like early detection of cancer. You can save the rest of your day by preventing some messy dead ends before they even happen.

Re: 3. Not everyone on the team will be using AI to the level the Jedi are. And personal responsibility for your code, 90% AI generated or 0%, is still your responsibility. Once you make your PR and ask for feedback, you should no longer be able to say "oh I didn't write this part." Yes you did. No one on the team needs to know what % AI your PR was. And you don't need to know theirs.

I've sort of gotten on the bandwagon. I initially used AI auto complete at my previous job and liked it a lot as a better intellisense, but wouldn't have used it to write PRs -- for one I tried it a couple times and it just wasn't good enough.

My new job pushes cursor somewhat heavily and I gave it a try, it works pretty well for me although it's definitely not something I would rely on. I like being able to ask it to do something and let it go off and come back to it in a while to see how it did. For me, I think it makes it easier to start on changes by coming into something (that might be wrong and bad), but for me personally having something in a PR to start from is a nice mental hack.

If it did well enough on the initial attempt I'll try to stick with it to polish it up, but if it failed terribly I'll just write it by hand. Even when it fails it's nice to see what it did as a jumping off point. I do wish it were a bit less prone to "lying" (yada yada anthromorphization it's just tokens etc.,) though, sometimes I'll ask it to do something in a particular way (e.g., add foo to bar and make sure you X, Y, and Z) and it'll conclude (rightfully or not) that it can't do X, but then go on anyway and claim that it did X.

I wish it were easier to manage context switching in cursor though, as it is juggling IDE windows between git repo clones is a pain (this is true for everything though, so not unique to cursor). I wish I could just keep things running on a git branch and come back to them without having to manage a bunch of different clones and windows etc.,. I think this is more of a pain point with cursor since in theory it would allow you to parallelize more tasks but the tooling isn't really there.

edit: the starting point for this is probably worktrees, I remember reading about these a while ago and should probably check them out (heh) but it only solves the problem of having a bunch of clones sitting around, I'd still need to manage N windows.

If you add an AGENTS.md, the AI agent will work more efficiently, and there will be far fewer problems like the ones you’re facing. You can include sections such as Security, coding style guidelines, writing unit tests, etc.

I think it’s allowed me to spend more time being an architect and thinking about processes, problem solving. To put it another way, I’m still a developer, possibly to a higher degree (because I can spend more time doing it), and less of a coder.

The worst is when I have to baby-sit someone else’s AI. It’s so frustrating to get tagged to review a PR, open it up, and find 400 lines of obviously incorrect slop. Some try to excuse by marking the PR [vibe] but like what the hell, at least review your own goddamn ai code before asking me to look at it. Usually I want to insta reject just for the disrespect for my time.

Using AI assistants != Vibe Coding.

AI can be a helpful assistant but they are nowhere near ready for letting loose when the results matter.

It makes me wonder if the golden age of programming is over.

Idk what most people are doing but coding with AI requires special skillset.

Here I put ClaudeCode in a while loop and clone itself: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/TY3SNp7eI9

After a week it was ready, you just need a good prompt.

People who say it cannot create anything beyond simple things are wrong. In my experience you can create anything provided your plan is good.

We're training our own replacement.

Why do the news need to make everything sound sensational. Let's move on.

An advertisement, where the protagonists weigh the pros and cons and then come down on the side of "paying the innovation tax".

Fastly profits from"AI" just like Cloudflare (or should we say "Claudeflare").

This selection of developers does seem representative at all. The new strategy is to acknowledge "AI" weaknesses but still adamantly claim that it is inevitable.

I for one am absolutely sick and tired of hearing opinions about AI coding from people selling tools and solutions that use AI coding.

I for one am sick and tired of hearing opinions about AI coding from people selling tools and "solutions" using AI. It's as if the entirety of tech media is just one massive ad.

I know that it's always been this way to some degree, but this is getting out of hand.

PR fatigue is a real thing

Related:

The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45235458

And yet it is still so hard to get something sufficiently complete to launch, even with AI.

AI just makes ambition and competition go up.

No it hasn't. Next.

Everyone suggesting maintaining an agent.md file haven’t met the majority of their coworkers who refuse to document anything or read documentation. Perhaps train a model that can generate these agent files for them?

Not really surprising

AI commentary has been super interesting

Kind of wild watching engineers, technologists, etc clutch their pearls

AI makes mistakes - so do people - I’ve been paid many a time to go clean up the non-AI generated code humans left behind. I’ve spent countless hours troubleshooting dumb bugs generated by humans

AI brings its own set of problems but I think some people just don’t want to hear what a net benefit it is

Post after post lamenting that no machine will ever replace the human touch is so old - people have been saying that about new technology since the beginning of time

I say embrace it - great to talk about its problems objectively and how to avoid common issues, but it’s tiresome to hear all the reasons why it’s crap all the time

I would instead love articles (you do see them here sometimes) that go over how people coded complex solutions to problems using AI and the challenges they faced along the way

Knowing where the weak points are or where it may be prone to error

If you don’t embrace it, pretty soon kids coming out of college that grew up with it that contrary to popular DO understand fundamentals are going to be running circles around the people who haven’t yet figured out how to get value out of it - while you’re out there saying it’s crap and only idiots use it, these kids are going to be moving mountains - I can’t wait to see the cool stuff people build - I don’t see the future as bleak

Where does this vibe term come from. There is no fucking vibe here. Just ask question to AI service and then check the results. Saves ton of time but one must be vigilant and be able spot bullshit. Often the solution is correct but code is very inefficient. Luckily in many cases AI can correct based on subsequent critique / input.

One improvement is to start using an AGENTS file. There are many. Here's the repo that I personally use thanks to Pontus Abrahamsson and using TypeScript:

https://github.com/pontusab/directories

If you prefer AGENTS.md files using markdown, I've extracted them into my own repo:

https://github.com/SixArm/ai-agents-tips

I have very few issues with Claude. If I just tell it what the goal is, it will make some sensible suggestions, and I can tell it to start coding towards it. It rarely messes up, and when it does I catch it in the act.

You don't necessarily want to completely tune out while you're using the AI. You want to know what it's up to, but you don't need to be at your highest level of attention to do it. This is what makes it satisfying for me, because often it eats up several minutes to hunt down trivial bugs. Normally when you have some small thing like that, you have to really concentrate to find it, and it's frustrating.

When the AI is on a multi-file edit that you understand, that's when you can tune out a bit. You know that it is implementing some edit across several instances of the same interface, so you can be confident that in a few minutes everything will build and you will get a notification.

It's as if I can suddenly make all the architecture level edits without paying the cost in time that I had previously.