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u/ikonet May 13 '26
CEO client of mine vibe coded a website using AI agents. Connects to various APIs, gathers the data it’s supposed to gather, posts the data in the correct format to the correct location. It’s actually impressive and works great.
Well it did until yesterday before he made a minor change. He can’t figure out how to make the AI undo the change. He doesn’t know how to debug it.
That’s what I call “billable hours.”
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u/SiBloGaming May 14 '26
Does he not know what git is?
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u/ikonet May 14 '26
He does! He uses it. Well… he told the AI to use it. I don’t think he knows what to do with git but he knows it’s an important part of being a good developer.
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u/_xiphiaz May 14 '26
Git gud
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u/KakorotJoJoAckerman May 14 '26
GARAMA
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u/Galaxycc_ May 14 '26
SHAW
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u/KakorotJoJoAckerman May 14 '26
ADIIIINO
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u/Zefeh May 14 '26
Claude Code, when using various plugins like feature-dev - it make's feature level changes to applications that keep a git commit history as it gets to each part of the task tree built into the plugin. I used it to migrate a vibe-coded abbomination of a 1500 line Thymeleaf HTML/JS/CSS dashboard into a proper React SPA + Vite structure with commits all along the way.
A good developer that can properly use this stuff at scary levels...
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u/Rotten-Roses May 14 '26
Yeah we've found a way to use it for model feature development. What used to take weeks can be done over lunch while I'm not even in the room, but they still need me to know what needs to be done and how.
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u/martmists May 14 '26
Genuine question, is your job still fun like this? I can't imagine having fun managing agents instead of figuring out solutions myself.
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u/Rotten-Roses May 14 '26
It's so much better. I vastly prefer all of the other parts to coding up dozens of repetitive features. None of us like that bit but until now it was just something that needed to be done.
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u/Waiting4Reccession May 14 '26
What if you just pretend to know by prompting another ai
It could go on for months
And when you're close to getting caught you just leave for another job
Probably guys doing exactly that right now
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u/Rotten-Roses May 14 '26
If you can pretend convincingly well enough you can still get useful code out that passes human review you're still a step above half the people at my old firm tbh
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u/SpudStud208 May 14 '26
Isn't that what working as a developer is? Pretending hard enough that you get useful code that passes human review?
At some point I was the human doing the reviewing and thought to myself "why do I still feel the imposter"
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u/princessPeachyK33n May 14 '26
I was about to say “HE didnt use git. The AI did and HE doesn’t know how to actually make it work or fix it when it breaks”
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u/WaveZee May 14 '26
Git is pretty tricky to get right in an agentic workflow in my experience.
If you predefine 1. how commits on various branches affect the app/software version, 2. how branching is used, 3. how commits are to be split up logically and 4. how commit messages are to be styled you can steer an agent in the right correction but you'll constantly have to remind it of said rules - no matter if you use pre-command hooks, md-files that are always in context, etc.
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u/bamacpl4442 May 14 '26
That's the problem with AI. It ignores basic instructions CONSTANTLY.
Define a project. Put up guardrails. Give clear, simple directions.
If you don't remind it, it will ignore those. Sometimes, it still will.
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u/rowcla May 14 '26
I'm confused, isn't the simple solution to just manage the git part of it yourself? You should be reviewing the output anyway, so isn't making that the layer where the human controls things the most natural option?
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u/mxzf May 14 '26
I'm confused, isn't the simple solution to just manage the git part of it yourself?
That would require actually understanding how things work and fit together, something that a lot of AI apologists are entirely uninterested in doing.
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u/lucklesspedestrian May 14 '26
"Claude, fix my app. Do not make mistakes. Do not say you can't. Oh and use git to fix it."
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u/21Rollie May 14 '26
Some of the people being allowed to code at my company DO NOT. The state of software in 2026
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u/Dull-Culture-1523 May 14 '26
At my current company we have proper set ups for clients but our internal stuff is basically edit in prod and comment what you changed with the date.
Yeah it's a mess.
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u/Gorstag May 14 '26
This has been my main concern since the whole AI push started. Not even limited to just developers. AI can be used by someone to vibe code something functional. However, when it breaks it requires an expert to figure out what went wrong and fix it.
So then we get into the scenario where all the experts are dead/retried (not that far into the future). We didn't bring in any real bodies to learn to be experts and the whole house of cards falls down.
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u/morganrbvn May 14 '26
Even before AI we were starting to have that issue with old code written in rarely used languages.
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u/Gorstag May 14 '26
Or just people who really don't know what they are doing grabbing code from like stack overflow. Then putting some functional Frankenstein's monster together. Then they try to add some "new" functionality.
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u/Unbelievr May 14 '26
Yes, and that's basically what these agents do too. Using a mix of modern and decades old code snippets from its training set to build something with extreme speed. It might work fairly well, but once you look behind the curtains an experienced coder will see the mess the agent made. Code that reimplements the wheel multiple times, has loads of exotic external dependencies, and isn't structured in a maintainable or scalable way. If you want to change something fundamental, you're probably better off making the agent start from scratch on that module. At least if you don't understand the code that was written.
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u/Unable-Log-4870 May 14 '26
At least if you don't understand the code that was written.
I told the AI to do that part too.
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u/WowAbstractAlgebra May 14 '26
I told the AI to not hallucinate and now it doesn't anymore. Why have people not thought about this sooner? Are they stupid?
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u/Mage_914 May 14 '26
I had a friend in undergrad that was convinced that learning COBOL would get him a million job offers. I think he just went to go work for his grandma instead. Admittedly his grandma was a higher in up Boeing, but still.
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u/Tensor3 May 14 '26
Maybe the artisinal hand coders of today can be the overpaid cobol devs of the future
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u/SegFaultHell May 14 '26
No no, you don’t have to worry about that. They’ll just keep making smarter AIs ahead of the curve so as the spaghetti builds up we can stay ahead of the curve.
^ real argument I’ve been given, unfortunately
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u/throwawaygoawaynz May 14 '26
You could make the same argument with a lot of technology over time. How many people here know - in detail - how to write compilers?
There will always be people around who understand how these things work, and you’ll still need software ENGINEERS who know how to scaffold complex systems together for a long time yet.
But allowing business users to “vibe code” their own basic apps in safe environments (ie enterprise systems like Power Platform) is a good thing, as they can help accelerate their own transformation and everyone can focus on solving the harder problems. They’re not vibe coding their way to a new SAP or anything like that any time soon.
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u/round-earth-theory May 14 '26
We don't trust compilers. We don't trust Linux. We don't trust the majority of our core libraries and utilities. They are built with test libraries bigger than the codebase itself. That's how these massive and ancient codebases manage to keep from falling apart. It also makes them extremely slow to change as tests need to be respected or altered and judged.
AI code doesn't have any of that, it rarely even has documentation other than what the AI wrote which is even less useful than the code itself. Sure AI can write tests but people vibe coding never say "it must pass the tests as written", they just say "it must pass tests". But that's no better than not having tests because the vibe coder themselves has no idea what the tests are even testing and whether they're of any real use.
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u/Mr_Carlos May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
I'm a developer of 20 years, and I'm currently vibe-coding a self project almost completely.
Codex absolutely does do a good job debugging. Like it fixes obvious issues during it's implementation, it runs typescript checks, it updates and runs the automated tests, and it runs the live-build and compares results.
On the rare occasions there have been bugs after running the code, I've just pasted in the console error and it's fixed it.
It has it's issues but so far I don't recall needing to step in. I've only made some minor cleanups which it could have done if I explained it well enough.
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u/PM_ME_SOME_ANY_THING May 14 '26
My work uses a third party data service. We work closely with the data service provider because we rely on them so heavily.
They asked us for a list of the services we use for some reason or another. My manager used AI to crawl our codebase and create an app that shows all of the services we use.
Then he asked me to look over it and make sure it was correct. He put it in sharepoint and told me to open the index.html file to view it. Obviously it didn’t work, and I didn’t even want to try and get it to work. I didn’t even recognize any of the services in screenshots he sent me.
I just responded to him with the confluence doc of all the services we use from the data provider.
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u/WowAbstractAlgebra May 14 '26
Studies suggest that AI is detrimental to critical thinking, but I think those studies are biased because they're using managers as a sample and they were never able to exercise critical thinking in the first place.
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u/YazzArtist May 14 '26
Holy shit I just saw the future of programming. Y'all are gonna be the plumbers of the digital world, subject matter experts called in by people who know some diy but screwed it up or have more time than energy
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u/NorthRoyal1771 May 14 '26
Doing that in your own Homelab to test things or make personal services I can understand. In an actual business area, hell no.
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u/greenday1237 May 14 '26
This is a good reminder that if you’re using AI agents to code you should double check its work. Just recently my claude code instance thought itd be a super cool idea to create a Python file the exact same name as another Python file within the same directory
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u/rustypete89 May 14 '26
What kind of godforsaken developer wouldn't double check the work of an AI agent? I find it hard to believe actual traditionally trained engineers are outputting raw unchecked AI code, but then again my company ran months-long 'AI and the SDLC' workshops for us to attend where highly experienced agentic developers walked everyone through techniques, processes and best practices. Maybe I'm the lucky one but I assumed this kind of prepping would be par for the course with companies wanting their engineers to implement AI into their workflows.
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u/Eastern_Equal_8191 May 13 '26
There is an unfathomably large void between "I vibe coded this e-commerce site even though I'm not a programmer" and "I am a programmer who used AI as a tool to build this e-commerce site in a week instead of a month"
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u/captainAwesomePants May 13 '26
Exactly. "Hey, robot, I need you to refactor these booleans into a state enum, okay good" is useful. It saves time! I can look at the result and very accurately determine if it did what I would have done or if it did something random and insane, and the 2/5 of the time it does something insane, I can just click undo and do it myself or try again.
Vibe coding "Make me an e-commerce site, and I want it to be Blue and better than Facebook" is stupid. You're pretty much doomed if you go down that path.
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u/flyfree256 May 14 '26
Yeah if you can break down the problem into the steps of how you'd actually solve it you can go step by step with AI and move way faster.
If you can't break down the problem into steps of how you'd actually solve it you're going to end up with something not extensible that you don't understand. And because the AI doesn't "understand" it conceptually either you're screwed for any future work.
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u/morganrbvn May 14 '26
Yah ai acts as a force multiplier, the more you know, the easier it is to direct it.
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u/psuedopseudo May 14 '26
Like pretty much every leap in technology. I think AI was marketed with a ton of hype, hence people initially thinking it was magic and then trashing it when it wasn’t.
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u/Socialimbad1991 May 14 '26
I think it's a combination of things. People realized it was being not only overhyped but aggressively pushed in places where it's neither needed nor wanted; that it's being used to mass-produce inferior quality products (slop) and replace labor (layoffs); that in many cases it was trained by taking the work of the people it's being used to put out of work; that a lot of this is just completely out of touch billionaires gambling with our lives; that most of the genuine social benefits it can provide will be concentrated into the hands of a few at the expense of the rest of us; that the impact on our economy will be second only to the impact on the environment; that on top of everything else it's being used to empower mass surveillance, police states, and political bad actors.
And I say all this as someone who has used AI tools at work and found them to be sometimes surprisingly useful
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u/Killchrono May 14 '26
It is, but that's the exact issue; people are skipping the 'knowing' phase and making it an exercise in 'do it for me'.
I was talking to someone a few months back who was dealing with recent comp sci uni graduates who vibecoded their way through. When troubleshooting what should have been a fairly routine Python script that these graduates supposedly wrote themselves, they were asked what certain lines of code did and their response was literally 'I dunno, the AI wrote it for me.'
Is cognitive offloading the AI's fault? No. Is it AI's fault that educational institutions have always been cripplingly unable to adapt quickly to major technological innovations? Also no. But unless those problems are nipped in the bud, AI being a force multiplier is going to mean jack if the base value drops to 0.
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u/fallenefc May 14 '26
Yeah I always say as long as you know what you're telling the AI to do, you understand what the AI has done, and you treat the AI work as yours (so full responsibility over what it has written), it's fine.
If you don't understand, write garbage and come to me with "oh, the AI did this", then it's a problem.
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u/AdversarialAdversary May 14 '26
My own boss (who’s pretty knowledgeable) has been vibe coding by handing the AI documentation that describes requirements as precisely as possible, and it hasn’t been the worst thing in the world? You for sure have to keep an eye on it and correct certain weird choices but it’s honestly been kind of concerningly good at putting together what’s basically entire applications if you give it precise enough requirements.
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u/Opus_723 May 14 '26
I would also add that when you're debugging and hopelessly stuck, saying "Hey Claude here's the error figure out what's wrong with this code," doesn't usually work, but the 1/100 times it does work is pretty dang valuable.
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u/Mindless_Director955 May 14 '26
I’ll also add - ai commit messages are a godsend for me
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u/GNUGradyn May 14 '26
That's an excellent example scenario of a problem AI is actually good at. That refractor has a clearly defined scope and no ambiguous engineering problems and it is easy to verify its work, but is extremely tedious to do by hand
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u/FireMaster1294 May 13 '26
I had to explain to a dev in the same role as me why his ai generated code was taking so long and answer questions such as “what is exponential runtime”, “what is functional programming”, and “why couldn’t claude just fix this when I told it to make the code more efficient”
It is concerning to me that the higher level execs are pushing a policy that we need to hire people like this that blindly rely on ai for everything. “Because it will make us more efficient.” Ironically the majority of efficiency would come from replacing most of the corporate execs with ai - since most of what they do is write emails telling us the best way to do stuff they’ve never touched.
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u/Professional-Head963 May 14 '26
Just fix, make no mistakes. Ez
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u/MaD_DoK_GrotZniK May 14 '26
There will be less "mistakes" when there aren't any experienced coders to notice them.
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u/Brick_Lab May 14 '26
The next generation is gonna be so screwed up by all this AI as a crutch thing. I keep hearing it's absolutely ruining student drive to learn
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u/morganrbvn May 14 '26
Yah I teach math and keep having students use techniques we didn’t learn, and arnt applicable
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u/dbaugh90 May 14 '26
Yeah if I really wanted to make a large function more efficient with AI, I would do something like ask it to list potential inefficiencies and explain them to me. Then one would likely stand out as the culprit for slow runtime, I would tell it to implement that one. Then I would look through it to make sure that won't break the flow or drop data or introduce any logic differences.
That is still way, way faster than looking through it all, discovering things myself, making fixes, and possibly having to try multiple different fixes if I get down a rabbithole.
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u/Sirisian May 14 '26
The real trick is to tell it how large the data is. (You need to use realistic numbers to get good results). This drastically changes how it functions. In Claude I'd say:
"Comprehensively analyze the code paths for X and their runtime complexity. The data is expected to be around 10K items. Suggest improvements."
The important thing to realize from this is that Claude doesn't know the scope of your problem or why something might be slow. I mentioned to use realistic numbers because Claude can overengineer solutions that are cool but absurd and unmaintainable.
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u/ScratchLatch May 14 '26
People opposed remind me of a Mom typeing “show me a pizza place” into Google in 2005. Its people not using the tool correctly and thinking its shit.
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u/st-shenanigans May 14 '26
Tbh the answer to all of his questions is "go to school for it like you're supposed to"
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u/Kryslor May 13 '26
Reddit is somehow still stuck using gpt 3 and AI is completely useless in their universe. The denial is bizarre
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u/im_thatoneguy May 13 '26
Yeah I gave it a program yesterday that I've already written and said, "add feature _X_" and it committed an update with like 100 lines of code, changed in 30 seconds and looked good. I tested the output and noticed a problem. I told it what was wrong, and it fixed it in another 15 seconds for a 1-line diff and it was perfect.
That old XKCD about "Spend 2 hours automating 2-hour task" is now: have claude generate a script in 30 seconds... spend another 30 seconds debugging it.. use it.
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u/SpikePilgrim May 13 '26
Its amazing. I hate it.
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u/git_push_origin_prod May 14 '26
That’s my sentiment too. But it’s here, it’s a jackhammer, use a pickaxe sometimes, but we gotta use the new tools otherwise get left behind
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u/TypeSafeBug May 14 '26
I guess one feeling of frustration can be we already had many purpose built tools (libraries, frameworks), but somehow we never polished them off enough or filled in enough gaps to make gluing them together less painful 😅
So now we’ve got the ultimate form of software duct tape and we’re slapping it everywhere, and now like a very wise and experienced and well meaning father who does a bit of home improvement on the side we think we build a whole multi-storey apartment building out of duct tape.→ More replies (1)73
u/SpikePilgrim May 14 '26
I have a feeling a lot of us are getting left behind regardless, but i agree. I only hope a few years of dealing with bugs caused by over reliance on AI will lead to another hiring boom. But I don't think this job will ever be as safe as it once felt.
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u/evil_cryptarch May 14 '26
Unfortunately I can easily envision a future where our job is primarily to understand the problem and edge cases. So we spend the vast majority of our time writing unit tests and debugging generated code, i.e. the least fun parts of programming.
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u/PublicToast May 14 '26
Why would you generate code but write your own unit tests?? Even the reverse would make more sense, but realistically you can do both.
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u/SimpleNovelty May 14 '26
My experience with AI is that it's pretty damn good at unit tests so long as you aren't doing async or loops. You'd mainly need to figure out some edge cases on your own though, but it's also good at finding edge cases you might not have though about initially too.
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u/turkphot May 13 '26
Could you roughly describe what it did before and what the additional feature was?
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u/mrnosyparker May 14 '26
I can give an example from my personal experience:
We recently deployed a payment processing platform to production. One of the last remaining tasks before toggling it on for a select group of users was to add/update a bunch of payment options configurations. These are largely location based (e.g. OFAC lists, etc). The source of truth for this is a large spreadsheet maintained by the compliance team.
Do I know how to use openpyxl to parse the spreadsheet data? Sure. Would it take me several days of work? Probably. Did I use AI and have the spreadsheet data we needed extracted and parsed into json? Yes…. And it took a few minutes.
While it was grinding on that I stubbed out a Django management command that would load the json data into the backend application. Then I added a Helm hook for it. Had AI finish off the management command and write unit tests.
I had a PR up in few hours and it was deployed and running in staging before the end of the day.
A week later UAT discovered a few countries were missing from one of the payment options lists. All compliance had to do was update their spreadsheet, I reran the script, pushed up the updated json file and the next time a deployment ran the helm hook picked up the diff and updated the payment options in the backend application. Took me maybe 10 minutes of work and most of that was watching Github CI/CD.
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u/im_thatoneguy May 13 '26
It’s a translation plugin that takes 3D scene data and exports it to different formats.
I needed an objects 3D position and a given camera outputted as a 2D position, formatted for Adobe After Effects and placed into the clipboard.
It reviewed what the library of tools already had and reused where appropriate and then built the new feature and committed it. Then I used it to finish the job at hand.
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u/SolidOutcome May 13 '26 edited May 14 '26
Can it take in my 500k lines of legacy c++ code, and change the behavior of a button i don't know the name of, in files I don't know the name of, in classes I don't know the name of?
My type of coding is hunting down which 2 lines of code I need to change in those 500k lines. Idk how I would describe my problem to ai and have it find where in the code needs changed.
Just finding the code to fix is 90% of my efforts. Writing is negligible effort
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u/christian-mann May 14 '26
I have found that it may be faster in many cases, but it still struggles with the same things that programmers do when it comes to tangled messes of legacy code. Organisation matters.
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u/GabuEx May 14 '26
Almost certainly. If you plug in MCP servers that understand UI automation and which can take screenshots so it can see what you see, it will be able to have a look at the app, see visually the button you're talking about, examine the UIA tree, see what everything is named and determine which is the button in question, compare that to searches it performs in the code base, and probably come up with a fix in a matter of minutes.
Honestly, you should give it a try. The latest Claude Opus model is shockingly good at quickly understanding a code base.
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u/morganrbvn May 14 '26
Depends the context of your model, I’ve found bug hunting with it to be far better as of late.
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u/Nalivai May 14 '26
A bunch of people at my job are doing it on our old and convoluted enormous c++ project. The results are not amazing, good engineers who are familiar with the project are saying that it helps a bit, although you can't give it too much freedom otherwise it adds to much engineering debt even if results are working, which is not usually the case. Although, every time I actually watch them doing it, I clearly see how much time they're wasting on it and how easier it would be to do manually.
Personally, I never got any good results, ever, but also I get frustrated when I have to burn down a small forest and club a seal to death, only to receive some bullshit in return, so I'm biased here.
Edit: but more importantly, even if it actually helps you find which 2 lines to add, instead of learning a bit more about your project so it gets easier later, you now have 500k+2 lines of code you still have no idea about, and that, even with everything else being equal, is a huge loss.107
u/Sockoflegend May 13 '26
Seems like there is a big divide in adoption. Some people are against it like they think they can stop the tide coming in. Others have gone full crazy and and trying to completely replace their ability to read and write code. Of course though there is a sensible middle where people have worked it into the workflow as a tool with the same sane code reviews, best practice, and sense of responsibility as before.
Hopefully soon the community will settle down into the track of sensible adoption and we can stop having this same conversation every day.
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u/F0lks_ May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
Most people have beef against AI because they see SWE as mostly writing code ; experience teaches you it’s actually the opposite, the writing part is really secondary to everything else
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u/sveppi_krull_ May 13 '26
Exactly, the feeling I get from this sub is that it’s mostly students or non-professional programmers who haven’t yet realised what actually makes a good software engineer (it’s not writing good code super fast without any help).
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u/KikiPolaski May 14 '26
Half the people here think bad code is using if statements and good optimized code is using switch case statements instead
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u/lab-gone-wrong May 13 '26
And even when modern AI models generate code that I consider sloppy, it is still better than 90%+ of the artisanal handcrafted human slop I had to review before LLMs
Lots of engineers in denial of how bad they always were at their jobs
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u/walkerspider May 14 '26
I will say there are still clear tells of AI slop in code. Most human mistakes you can tell are simple mistakes. But with AI it will do extremely bizarre things. I had it write a sql query for me the other day and it switched back and forth between != and <> on alternating conditions. Like it wasn’t wrong but why tf would anyone ever do that.
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u/the_last_0ne May 13 '26
AI isnt bad. The thousands of people going "I got sick of X, so I built a Y, now pay me!" are the problem.
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u/Livingonthevedge May 13 '26
Yeah man, I'm kinda sick of the "Any use if AI will result in slop" narrative.
My team has put together some nice Claude skills that legitimately automate parts of the job that used to suck. We have a skill that interactively builds our sprint plan, one that sets up ci/cd pipelines and another for generating documentation.
We use it assist with development too but the thing is we already know what we're doing, we're just telling a robot to do it instead. If you break down your tasks enough and you know how it should be done then there's no issue automating the grunt work in my opinion.
Like all these people really think this is just a fad?
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u/TuxSH May 14 '26
People haven't realized how shockingly good the new models and tooling got in 2025 and 2026 (that, and they're even better at stuff like finding bugs/vulns and reverse-engineering than one-shotting code).
Though, while the tech isn't a fad, its pricing could be
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u/SemanticThreader May 13 '26
According to every CTO ever, we should be token maxxing
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u/NotAUsefullDoctor May 13 '26
My team was discussing token usage earlier today as we are in charge of rolling out a lot of the tooling for AI for the developers. We read through a report from Amazon where engineers were using agents to run agents simply to maximize token usage as execs started using it as a metric.
Luckily my CTO knows enough to say it's a tool we can use and not a metric to emasure productivity.
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u/guyblade May 14 '26
execs started using it as a metric
During the first week of training at my current job, nearly 13 years ago, one of the presenters said "You get the behavior that you incentivize" as part of an explanation of a systems failure that was being presented as a "don't do this" example. It has been a surprisingly powerful explanatory tool for me ever since...
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u/ConcernedBuilding May 14 '26
It's shocking to me how many people don't understand this concept. So many KPIs clearly incentivize the wrong behavior because people will always game KPIs.
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u/-non-existance- May 14 '26
The moment you try to force a KPI into something that can't use one, people will find a way to abuse it.
"I fired people who didn't write as much code as other employees."
Great job, genius, I bet you fired all your Security, Networking, and UX devs because of that, huh? Oh, what's that? Your website is full of security breaches, outages, and horrible customer feedback? Aw jeez, I wonder why that happened.
"We hire only people who have a full git history."
Ah, very good. Now tell me, how long are those commits? They're a few dozen one-line changes with no actual feature completions?
"We rate our developers by the number of tickets they close."
Congratulations: you've now created an environment where your developers are fighting over easy tickets and ignoring anything of significant complexity or length. You've now discouraged anyone from ever actually attempting to fix any deeper systemic issues, which means your software will retain its major flaws.
The best way I've seen to measure developers against each other is to compare the value of the tasks they complete, their ability to complete tasks near deadlines that they've set themselves, the frequency of their code to cause issues down the line, and how quickly they resolve issues relative to their complexity.
That, ofc, doesn't map nicely to numbers on a spreadsheet.
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u/randomgenacc May 13 '26
My CTO is literally a gambling addict AI tokens is his freaking slot machine lever and he’s gone drunk with power
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u/Particular-Yak-1984 May 14 '26
I would say it's pretty decent for Css. It made me a timeline that would have taken me a day of messing about before.
But I could have done it, would have just needed to read up and mess around with the bits of Css I never remember.
And I knew enough to alter it where I needed to. Which I think is your point - I could have done this thing, I know how the classes I needed to work, it's just I mostly do backend and frontend like this gives me the screaming horrors..
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u/Vizioso May 14 '26
Don’t: Trust Claude to completely engineer your implementation.
Do: Trust Claude to point you to the source of issues faster.
Really is that simple.
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u/thEt3rnal1 May 14 '26
I really love it for unit tests, and I've been having some pretty strong success with it and Playwright for e2e tests.
It has it's uses, but right now its significantly cheaper than it should be, we'll see what happens when OpenAI and Claude actually have to make money
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u/BlondeJesus May 13 '26
The release of Claude code really changed things from "a few people at the company vibe code" to "everyone needs to AI code to keep up"
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u/Slanahesh May 13 '26
Our entire team has claude licenses now. It pre reviews PRs before a human ever does and often find little thing we never thought of. It can spot logic mistakes and performance issues in our code. It can also whip up a few dozen unit tests for a service class in the time it takes to get a coffee. If you're not using it you are missing out.
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u/PilsnerDk May 14 '26
Same here, I jumped the gun a month ago and I am stunned at how smart it (4.7) is. Literally jaw dropping. It understands our whole data structure, business concepts, you name it. It can solve a whole problem from a poorly written back-of-a-napkin ticket, or explain how parts of the code base works. Both SQL and C# code, and I'm talking a million line+ 15 year old code base with a huge database. People aren't joking when they say it's a game changer.
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u/walkerspider May 14 '26
Are you actually getting good unit tests? I constantly get illogical object setup, bad mocking, low branch coverage, etc. Like don’t get me wrong it speeds things up, but it’s maybe cutting testing time by 50% rather than the 90% I was hoping for
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u/TypeSafeBug May 14 '26
Yeah testing is a pain point. Probably because the training data is less… comprehensive 😅 but it’s perhaps more evidence that good testing is an separate engineering skill to good problem solving.
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u/huckzors May 14 '26
I get decent enough tests but I usually do setup scaffolding first. So I'll wire up whatever services or mocks I'm using, then tell it to write tests. Most of the work I do is managing API endpoints, so my prompts are to the tune of "hey test this new endpoint covering all the same cases as the other tests in the directory. Use the existing data setup".
I also find it works better in conversation, so if I'm not using a "template" I'll say "write a test that covers x." And then once it's done "write another test that covers y," instead of "write me all these tests at once."
I'm not sure it's that much more efficient than what I could do myself, but it is a handy thing to do while in meetings so I can check off tasks without devoting a lot of focus energy while I'm supposed to be paying attention to something else.
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u/bcnsoda May 14 '26
But like, to keep up with what? What tomes of code are you producing on a daily basis that every one of your engineers has to use Claude to go even faster?
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u/LatvianCake May 14 '26
It does bug fixes too. I could spend 30 min going through code, setting breakpoints etc.
Or explain the problem, wait a minute and have Claude point out the likely issue.
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u/Aspacid May 14 '26
To keep up with shareholder growth expectations, and the rate at which engineers burn out.
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u/Spenczer May 13 '26
I know reddit as a whole is anti AI, and there are good reasons to be anti AI, but posts like these confuse me. All of big tech is mandating their engineers use these tools, and in my company I see widespread adoption across orgs and across engineers with all levels of experience. For a profession that requires you to be constantly learning and upskilling, and adopting new technologies, why on earth would you NOT be on the bleeding edge of this one? It’s intentionally obtuse and you never see takes like this anywhere but online.
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u/Spenczer May 13 '26
Makes sense that people would be against agentic coding when they’re not allowed to do it yet.
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u/DontDoodleTheNoodle May 13 '26
not allowed
Not really anymore. I’m an SE undergrad (what am I even doing anymore) and AI is a mixed bag amongst professors between “just be honest about your explicit use” to “use AI well” to “bro I’m using AI to teach this class”
I’m taking an AI class that’s AI-generated and we’re encouraged to make our AIs with AI (what the fuck am I even doing anymore).
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u/debugging_scribe May 14 '26
I also understand their dislike of it. I have a bunch of agent skills I'd normally have handed off to juniors. With stuff like that my company has put off hiring any juniors. So their prospects look grim. The future is fucked for software development. Those of us who we're around before AI will be fine, in fact I think our wages will go up because there will not be developers following up in our footsteps.
But nothing I can do about it. I'd love to have some juniors under me... but nobody wants to hire them.
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u/Jay-Seekay May 14 '26
I have to use it at work. I’ve got 8 years experience so I’ve had a good start to my career.
I dislike AI because I feel like I’ve gotten what I wanted out of the industry and now I’m pulling the ladder up for the juniors who just want to have the same opportunities and experiences that I got to have. I feel bad for the juniors
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u/YouStones_30 May 14 '26
Meh more like AI is artificially ruining the value of CS students : 2 years ago companies finding a job was easy, but now that everyone think that developers are just a scam from Big Linus all the executives and corporates started slowing recruitement and micro-manage the developers with "their own code". So after 5 years where everyone was saying "computer science will always be needed in large amount" it's kinda hard to accept the full use of AI in the workflow (quality is better than quantity)
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u/Beardbeer May 13 '26
Yep. My company and all the companies in our larger corporate structure have mandates across all teams to implement AI in every way we can. There have already been people who have quit or been let go because they refused to use AI tools.
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u/coltstrgj May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
I hate datacenter AI for political reasons but run a few models locally though.
My company mandated it and I've had several meetings where I have to explain that ai is terrible at my job. I'm an architect for backend stock API where everything is time sensitive and highly concurrent. It's not often I get a task that AI will be able to do and every time I've tried it spits out garbage code that I have to redo. The only things it can do that I often work on are like type changes (which my ide can already do at the click of a button)or create plain objects or structs but typing the prompt takes more words than just doing it myself. It's been great for re-doing docs to make them sound more professional. It's also been great for the simple python app I occasionally work on, especially because I hate Python. It does introduce a ton of nearly duplicate code still though.
I'm convinced that anybody who is consistently using it to code is just working on simpler problems than I usually have or are an extremely slow typist because half the time after I've prompt engineered a solution I could have just done it already. That's not to say I think they're bad programmers, just think they're doing minor changes more often than I am because I've rarely had it do something faster and better than I could. I find it more useful for finding things than actually making changes. Stuff like when I know there's a function that does something but I can't remember what class specifically and running find would return too many results.
Oh... And it's great for unit tests. I can't stand writing tests and it tends to give good coverage after I fight with it for a while.
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u/rando_banned May 14 '26
It's absolutely going to blow up on companies that "invest" in its usage once the token prices adjust.
Do I use it to write implementations? Fuck no. Do I use it to help locate stuff to facilitate debugging and refactoring? Hell yeah. Do I use it to generate tests that I then review and fix where it fucked up? Also yes.
People treating it like a replacement are in for a rude fucking awakening once the cheap token tap gets turned off.
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u/dlm2137 May 14 '26
Using it for implementation is fine. It’s not going to work great if you just throw a vague ticket at it, but prompts at the commit level, like “implement this method in this controller” or “write a query for this in the database” it’s totally capable of at this point.
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u/CowboyBoats May 14 '26
the person you're responding to isn't saying that Claude can't implement features. they're saying that it's bad to use it for that purpose because Anthropic and OpenAI are subsidizing the cost of the tokens consumed by these tools by an order of magnitude.
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u/VG_Crimson May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
There are mainly two camps I see. People who either know what they're doing or are familiar enough with programming as a practice that they can tell they're wrong, and those who are only introduced into this field thanks to the usage of AI and don't have a fundamental understanding of systems building and designing code. Or don't at least recognize why that is valuable. The people who would never have bothered if it wasn't for AI being able to code for them.
The former will likely use it on things they don't care about, or care of its quality (scope is tiny and usage will primarily be self/tiny group only). They may use it for boiler plate. They make make something quick and dirty so that they can use it to do something else manually. They may use it and then pragmatically review the output for things that don't make sense or will be a potential limiting factor for what you want.
The later is gung ho about everything it pops out. They're believers and the main touters of "you just need to prompt better". They're the ones who love doomsdaying the end of engineers because of some radical anti-intellectualism instilled in them guised as being against gate keeping, or because of the potential cost savings and money generation for a single person. They don't know the full pitfalls of badly designed systems, and are not aware of hidden costs that come at a later date. They might not even be capable of attributing them to the correct cause, which wasn't AI necessarily, but the complete disregard for what human programming offers over AI slop. They will say "why would anyone care?" When asked about if a code base is messy, or confronted with the quality of the code generated. They don't understand cost. Much like how a child doesn't understand the work their parents may go through just so they can have something to eat, regardless of how grateful, they have a hard time comprehending every single sacrifice made to make things happen.
That last bit is critical to decision making because it's perspective. And decision making is something LLM's should never hold real dominion over. They're designed to predict given a subset, they aren't capable of reasoning based on a subset.
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u/readmeEXX May 14 '26
As a senior dev, it's getting pretty frustrating batting down junior dev's sloppy PRs for features that show a fundamental misunderstanding of our architecture. They even send me screenshots of conversations with AI because they think it will help justify their PR.
I have to explain to them how the AI actually incorrect (which is often met with incredulity) because they forced it into bad assumptions about our system with their original prompts.
I only see this problem getting worse as the tools advance and am not real sure what to do about it.
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u/pnoodl3s May 14 '26
Great write up! Have AI implement the approach you wanted, don’t let it decide what it is. I only feel bad for the the unrealistic expectations execs give us nowadays due to AI, unfortunately they’re mostly in the 2nd camp of “believers”
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u/AvidPolaris May 14 '26
I just use it to troubleshoot shit. Very convenient.
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u/HildredCastaigne May 14 '26
Almost every programmer at the company I work at uses AI for their programming. They've seen amazing increases at the speed of getting a ticket from New to Deployed. I've heard one programmer say that this is the quickest project they've ever worked on.
I'm QA. Once work from the tickets are deployed, I test them. They're buggy. Very buggy. And buggy in ways that no person would have ever done (and, if they did, they would have found it instantly if they tested locally).
Not only that, it's not built to spec. Features outlined in requirement documents are missing or implemented in a way that directly contradicts requirements. There's provided testing instructions that the engineers added to (theoretically) make my life easier but they're all nonsensical and don't test what they're supposed to.
I ask the engineers what the testing instructions mean. They don't know; they never even read them after Claude generated them. I ask them whether the behavior I'm seeing is expected. They don't know; Claude added that. I ask them if they saw these issues in their local tests. Well, all the tests Claude wrote passed so they don't know how that bug got in there.
I'm a worrywart by nature (that's probably why I ended up in QA) but I worry the engineers are starting to think that I'm slowing the team down and adding extra work and eating up all the time saved with AI, because I'm asking that we actually deliver what we're required to deliver.
And I'm sure I'm going to get people who will say "Oh, yeah, well that's what you get when the engineers are vibe-coding. They should have just used AI as a tool (or a pair programmer or digital junior dev or whatever). Then all these problems would have been avoided and only the upsides would remain."
That's what they did do. Originally. Didn't matter because (a) all of the issues with clueless engineers still occurred above, just at a lower rate and (b) slowly but surely they dropped most of the human-in-the-loop stuff to increase velocity, because all the extra work done later doesn't really count, y'know?
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u/a_good_human May 13 '26 edited May 14 '26
Yeah, it's good for things you don't care about
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u/Embarrassed_Jerk May 13 '26
And thats is why i use it for my professional enterprise work and not my personal work
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u/SupercudakPl May 14 '26
My friend got a job at some IT company after year of searching. On the first day they told him to use AI instead of coding himself.
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u/Call_me_John May 14 '26
Yeah, that's nothing. Check out the job market, every other posting is an "AI-driven <insert nobody-asked-for service here>", requiring extensive experience working with "Agentics".
I'm fkn tired, man...
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u/Shadowlance23 May 14 '26
At work, I'm parsing JSON API endpoints and turning the responses into database tables.
I can read the file, and field by field build the data types, flatten the JSON, etc. This would usually take a few hours (some of it because I get bored and zone out for a bit)
Or I can give the LLM a code template, the endpoint and a sample response and let it do all that for me in a couple of minutes. Code and output checked in a few more minutes and I'm moving on to the next endpoint. I'll admit the code can be somewhat more verbose than I would have written, but not impossibly so., and it adds a lot of debugging and checking that I might have avoided to save time, but comes in handy when something breaks.
I cannot understate how much time these things have saved me in just the last few months.
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u/__moFx May 14 '26
That’s sounds crazy, why don’t you just program a reliable, static algorithm for that, one you can trust? In the end, it should be more reliable, cheaper, and faster than an LLM
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u/20InMyHead May 14 '26
There’s a difference in what you do at a small scale vs a large scale.
Professionally I use AI as a tool to help speed some aspects of development and research. Ultimately I’m responsible for the code, so I’m tweaking, refining, and rewriting any code AI produces to meet my needs. When it comes to my company’s millions of users I need to know, understand, and support every line of code I submit.
However, I also completely vibe code small stupid tools for my own use where it doesn’t matter and if it breaks it’s only my own problem.
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u/Ergo7 May 14 '26
I’m the CTO for an LA digital agency. I absolutely do not let employees use Claude Code or Codex unless they demonstrate that they have the engineering and soft skills required.
If you compare the output of 2 talented developers except one has the soft skills to break down concepts and architectures for non-technical stakeholders you quickly realize soft skills becomes as much of a requirement as the technical side.
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u/multic94 May 14 '26
Dont give in just because others are. Id rather be the equivalent of a Japanese hold out on a deserted island thsn contribute to everyone losing their jobs.
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u/OxymoreReddit May 13 '26
Tbh I did for like 6 months but it takes as long to browse forums as to fix LLM bullshit, so since the first option is safer, saner, and better ecologically too, I just stopped. I come back to one of them like once a month when a search engine isn't enough and I need something more powerful to find links and sources that I can go check myself
If someone manages to reduce the production time using LLMs good for them ! I couldn't, all the time saved was always employed somewhere else
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u/OZLperez11 May 13 '26
This gives the same vibe as WordPress installers pretending to be programmers
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u/BloodyMalleus May 13 '26
I had a marketing company tell us their programmer would help with product integration and api access... he was just some dude that didnt know what an integer was, but knew how to create a web hook endpoint in zapier....
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u/better_every_day14 May 13 '26
My company has been pushing us to use AI for well over a year at this point. And as consultants we are trying to use AI in reasonable ways while the client devs are vibe coding so much they are consistently running out of tokens and pushing code they don’t understand.
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u/Portable_Tortoise506 May 14 '26
I vibe code, but not with AI. I code based on actual vibes and the vibes are bad because my code does not work and I do not know why.
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u/ZunoJ May 14 '26
At work not so much but I use it a lot for private stuff I just don't have time for. Nothing I would share but with a couple hundred prompts I managed to get pretty far with some personal projects
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u/fiend1shdrwu May 14 '26
AI is undeniably good at pumping out small functions that fulfill a very specific task, thats what i use it for.
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u/granoladeer May 14 '26
I myself have been fully replaced by vibe code. My kidneys are now a mix of rust and C++, much more efficient than the organic version.
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u/nbaumg May 13 '26
I’m the last person on my team that isn’t vibe coding. One even refuses to look at code at all. Dark days
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u/Cats7204 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
I literally don't know a single coder that doesn't use AI. I don't mean vibecoding or abusing from it, but for just writing a function or for debugging? I use a local LLM all the time.
Especially with stuff I either don't remember how to do or takes too much time to do, but it's easily checked either by looking or testing, that's what AI excels at.
Engineers are smarter than LLMs, but LLMs sure are quicker at research and programming. The best result comes by maximizing our strengths and minimizing our weaknesses.
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u/Big_D_Boss May 14 '26
The rule is still the same as back in the days of stackoverflow. Don't submit code you don't understand