On AI Coding and Its Discontents
13 points by lvmbdv
13 points by lvmbdv
Color me skeptical that this anonymous engineer exists outside the author’s imagination. There’s serious issues to discuss but not with an imaginary engineer who put his career in danger by shipping vibecoded features.
It seems that the anonymous engineer, or at least a similar one, de-anonymized themselves by replying in the comments.
I've heard of similar situations with orgs coming to not know what is happening in their codebases anymore and things getting shakier as fallout from the initial LLM-maximalist vibecoding their employers pushed. So to me it isn't very infeasible, I've had similar conversations with people myself.
Something tells me that "anonymous engineer", even if fictional, is fairly representative of a large number of recently-graduated SWEs. And like @dustyweb said, someone echoed the experience in the comments.
Not just recently graduated SWEs. There are a lot of engineers of every seniority level in a lot of companies who believe they are at the mercy of what the company want's and just do whatever that company asks without considering the "unasked" for pieces. AI just maginifies and accelerates the timelines of the impact of that approach.
Either we take the job seriously no matter our seniority level and use the tools appropriately or we act as unwilling victims and blame the company for the results. Which attitude you take is the largest determiner of the quality of the code you produce.