Hello programmers! I’ve been making a living for a couple of decades figuring out stuff for people and coding whatever will make them happy. It’s fun. I’ve grown to prefer the people to the coding but I still get a kick out of the whole thing.
The problem is: at the job we’re being asked to pivot to vibe coding. At this point the order is to use it for all code, read the slop carefully, argue with the machine for way too long and only then open that PR. Massive productivity gains are expected. I’m appalled from an ethical, philosophical and professional standpoint. We’re a non-profit ngo ffs. My colleagues are fine with it. If I get even slightly critical the group goes awkwardly silent and I get comments on how all the programmers they know from other places don’t code anymore.
If this is how it goes from now on, I’m out. Is it really though? Are all businesses switching to vibe coding? Have some of you started switching career? I think I want to go to meatspace. Hand-made coding could make a cute hobby.
I am not a programmer, but related to a few. My cousin said his workplace actively evaluates people on token usage, where more is better. He has refined his prompts to burn as many tokens as possible.
Another relative said they only hire seniors now, and use AI for junior work. I told him there will be no more seniors in five years, doing things that way. Well, that’s a problem for later.
There are two things we measure inadequately with junior/senior. There are people who are highly skilled and have aptitude and passion for engineering - they are junior for lack of experience, but will be senior in good time.
Then there are people who are simply shit, who probably call themselves “coders”, who are proud of being self-taught by hacking out Javascript or got a vocational qualification from a Poly. They will remain junior forever (unless they work in outsourcing, in which case they’ll be billed as senior devs if they can bluff their way through for 6 months.)
The latter are fucked, the former will be fine; I suspect we’re going back to a world as it was 30 or 40 years ago though, where the quality of your degree is far more important and the number of vacancies far lower. I rather hope the death of outsourcing will also finally mean an end to the ridiculous job-title/expertise inflation that sector has wrought upon the industry.