8 ms·

Vibe coding has turned senior devs into 'AI babysitters'

127 points by CharlesW 1y ago

_c7zm 1y ago
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.
jph 1y ago
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 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 https://github.com/SixArm/ai-agents-tips
jitl 1y ago
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.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  Have your own agent do first pass code reviews, they catch that stuff every time.
  - goldenCeasar 1y ago
    And then the PR owner's agent can fix it and then after some number of iterations you get a PR for a new and mysterious system.
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      AI PR tarpit, anyone? :)
    - CuriouslyC 1y ago
      It's only new and mysterious if you don't have a tight spec and guardrails.
      - angxiaobi 1y ago
        There seems to be a gap between the theory you're advocating...which I actually agree with and the practical execution in your own public projects which you talk about heavily. I haven't been able to get any of your recently published projects (Scribe, volknut, a few others) running successfully on linux, whether following your documentation, using the tagged releases, or reverse engineering the true functionality and CLI arguments working from your provided source code I found to have wasted my time. It's difficult to believe you when your own documentation is entirely wrong or 404'd. I'd genuinely love to see your projects in action, since the concepts sound promising, but you need to back it up with shipping properly.
        CuriouslyC 1y ago
        There's a reason I haven't dropped release pages yet. These projects are under heavy development and I push to github to checkpoint mostly rather than release. I'm sorry if you feel like I've misled you, I've tried to be clear that what I'm sharing now is to understand what I'm doing, to give visibility, and it's not ready yet. I'm committed to delivering great software, and when I tell you it's ready you can rest assured that it will work. Understand that I'm one man working on 20 projects simultaneously, with 5+ under active development at any one moment, so release stabilization and cadence will take a little bit to lock in.
  - hamdingers 1y ago
    > they catch that stuff every time This is why AI code review continues to be mostly useless in my experience. If you instruct an LLM to make PR comments it will come up with some, every time, even when none are warranted.
    - CuriouslyC 1y ago
      So give them a schema and get them to give a relevance score, then filter below a threshold. Works better than trying to get them not to reply.
      - hamdingers 1y ago
        Seems like sound advice, unfortunate that the developers of the review tools I've had brushes with did not take it.
  - jitl 1y ago
    I try to avoid participating in the bullshit economy as much as possible
- dawnerd 1y ago
  I insta reject. It’s ridiculous how bad it’s made some devs. Are they even testing their work before tossing over the wall?
  - scrame 1y ago
    were they before?
    - dawnerd 1y ago
      Yep. Claude/copilot definitely has made people lazy.
    - mrheosuper 1y ago
      I would have a talk to whoever create a PR without testing anything.
- lawn 1y ago
  We need to normalize to reject crap PRs. If we don't then things will only continue.
- whynotminot 1y ago
  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.
  - jitl 1y ago
    I think the [vibe] is more like, “Watch out this pr is more sus than usual” but usually it’s too sus
- virgil_disgr4ce 1y ago
  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.
- xdennis 1y ago
  > 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.
  - jitl 1y ago
    I don’t mind a 2000 line PR if it’s quality code written by a human.
- dimator 1y ago
  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
- stillsut 1y ago
  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-summary.md#v010 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.
righthand 1y ago
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?
- eagerpace 1y ago
  I love maintaining my agent file. Yeah, it doesn’t always listen to the instructions, but neither does anyone else.
  - hopelite 1y ago
    You are touching on a critical point that I have been amused by at times in these types of conversations; people are hating on AI for doing all the things that people have done and still do. Poor planning, check. No/inadequate documentation, check. Sloppy and janky code, check. Poor practices and methods, check. Poor and miscommunication, check. Poor technical choices, check. What am I missing? Maybe this is just a matter of some of the top tier 100x devs and teams clutching pearls in disgust at having to look at what goes on below Mt Olympus, but this is also not any different to how code quality cratered and is still really poor due to all the outsourcing and H-1B (sorry, all you H-1B hopefuls) insourcing of quantity over quality. I say that without any judgement, but reality simply is that this issue has long been a quantity over quality argument even before AI, and mostly for non-dev reasons as the recent de-qualification of R&D funding revealed and had a marked impact on dev jobs because the C-suite could don't use R&D funding for financial shenanigans. If people want to hate AI, go ahead. People hated and hate on the H-1B abuses and they hate on AI now. I would hope that we can just move beyond griping and mean-girling AI, and get to a point where proper practices and methods are developed to maybe make the outcomes and outputs better. Because again, AI is not going anywhere less than even H-1B and I am sure the C-suite will find some new way to abuse and play financial shenanigans, but it's simply not going away and we need to learn to live with it since it will seemingly only get "better" and faster as it changes at breakneck speeds.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  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!
bgwalter 1y ago
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.
cedilla 1y ago
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.
- sussmannbaka 1y ago
  Hey now, there’s a lot of Hello World, Mandelbrots and Ugly Tailwind Dashboards too :o)
- greiskul 1y ago
  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.
  - jfil 1y ago
    A "Shovel Rush"
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- simianwords 1y ago
  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.
isaacremuant 1y ago
[flagged]
- badgersnake 1y ago
  [flagged]
johnjungles 1y ago
PR fatigue is a real thing
lordnacho 1y ago
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.
- hopelite 1y ago
  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
- whatevaa 1y ago
  Yeah, sounds about like babysitting a toddler.
siliconc0w 1y ago
Vibe Coding is so early 2025, I only check in context, prompt instructions, and seed values to deterministically generate the machine-code.
- fzzzy 1y ago
  LLMs aren’t deterministic even with a seed.
  - jsheard 1y ago
    Doesn't that depend on the implementation? There's a trade-off between performance and determinism for sure, but if determinism is what you want then it should be possible.
    - jb1991 1y ago
      If you fix random seeds, disable dropout, and configure deterministic kernels, you can get reproducible outputs locally. But you still have to control for GPU non-determinism, parallelism, and even library version differences. Some frameworks (like PyTorch) have flags (torch.use_deterministic_algorithms(True)) to enforce this.
  - jb1991 1y ago
    This. I’m still amazed how many people don’t understand how this technology actually works. Even those you would think would have a vested interest in understanding it.
  - geor9e 1y ago
    what if you set top_p=1, temperature=0, and always run it on the same local hardware
    - daemonologist 1y ago
      Maybe if you run it on CPU. (Maybe on GPU if all batching is disabled, but I wouldn't bet on it.)
haffi112 1y ago
Why do the news need to make everything sound sensational. Let's move on.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tennisflyi 1y ago
Not really surprising
cs702 1y ago
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. ?
- kermatt 1y ago
  3. Hire more developers to decode / devibe code, paying double in the end.
  - Analemma_ 1y ago
    Sure, but by that time you've IPO'd and dumped the bag on the public, founders and seed-round investors make bank and are long gone by then. I'm only half-joking: personally I'll be looking very closely at the IPO prospectus of any company founded in/after 2024 or so, to know how much vibe coding risk I can expect in its long-term prospects.
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  you'll be retired by 3, good luck kids
- anonymousiam 1y ago
  1. Replace junior developers with AI, reducing costs today. 2. ? 3. Profit! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts
- Spivak 1y ago
  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.
- pyuser583 1y ago
  It worked with COBOL.
FpUser 1y ago
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.
- chris_pie 1y ago
  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.
- x3n0ph3n3 1y ago
  It comes from people not checking the results thoroughly and taking a YOLO approach to it.
- andromaton 1y ago
  Coined by Andrej Karpathy
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Related: The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45235458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45235458
dwheeler 1y ago
Using AI assistants != Vibe Coding. AI can be a helpful assistant but they are nowhere near ready for letting loose when the results matter.
- stavros 1y ago
  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.
- DeepYogurt 1y ago
  Brother most of them ain't even assisting. Management just forces it.
matthewfcarlson 1y ago
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.
- EdwardDiego 1y ago
  At least your two year old learns.
gxs 1y ago
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
wewewedxfgdf 1y ago
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.
faangguyindia 1y ago
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 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.
neilv 1y ago
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?
- jennyholzer 1y ago
  > 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
- izabera 1y ago
  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 it's so incredibly productive
- Izkata 1y ago
  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.
samgranieri 1y ago
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?
- turtletontine 1y ago
  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-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
  - srcreigh 1y ago
    > We do not provide evidence that: > AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers > AI systems in the near future will not speed up developers in our exact setting > There are not ways of using existing AI systems more effectively to achieve positive speedup in our exact setting
    - Wowfunhappy 1y ago
      I don't understand how it doesn't provide evidence for the first of these. Sure you can't necessarily extrapolate to all software developers but it's still evidence just not proof.
- askonomm 1y ago
  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.
  - jennyholzer 1y ago
    I agree with this almost completely
the_unsender 1y ago
I for one am absolutely sick and tired of hearing opinions about AI coding from people selling tools and solutions that use AI coding.
the_unsender 1y ago
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.
INTPenis 1y ago
We're training our own replacement.
- wnc3141 1y ago
  https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-university-lays-off-79-it-workers-after-they-train-h-1b-replacements/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-universit...
bodhi_mind 1y ago
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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
foota 1y ago
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.
sys_64738 1y ago
It makes me wonder if the golden age of programming is over.
fcpguru 1y ago
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.
- AstroBen 1y ago
  A few minutes crafting a prompt to save weeks Thats like a 2000x productivity boost. AI is amazing
  - filoeleven 1y ago
    Citation needed.
    - AstroBen 1y ago
      ...the parent comment
- artisin 1y ago
  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.
NoPicklez 1y ago
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.
anon22981 1y ago
What I’ve seen also happen is senior devs suddenly starting to put out garbage code and PRs. One senior dev in our project has become a menace and the quality of his work has dramatically dropped.

127 points by CharlesW 1y ago

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.

jph 1y ago

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

jitl 1y ago

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.

CuriouslyC 1y ago
Have your own agent do first pass code reviews, they catch that stuff every time.
- goldenCeasar 1y ago
  And then the PR owner's agent can fix it and then after some number of iterations you get a PR for a new and mysterious system.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    AI PR tarpit, anyone? :)
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    It's only new and mysterious if you don't have a tight spec and guardrails.
    - angxiaobi 1y ago
      There seems to be a gap between the theory you're advocating...which I actually agree with and the practical execution in your own public projects which you talk about heavily. I haven't been able to get any of your recently published projects (Scribe, volknut, a few others) running successfully on linux, whether following your documentation, using the tagged releases, or reverse engineering the true functionality and CLI arguments working from your provided source code I found to have wasted my time. It's difficult to believe you when your own documentation is entirely wrong or 404'd. I'd genuinely love to see your projects in action, since the concepts sound promising, but you need to back it up with shipping properly.
      - CuriouslyC 1y ago
        There's a reason I haven't dropped release pages yet. These projects are under heavy development and I push to github to checkpoint mostly rather than release. I'm sorry if you feel like I've misled you, I've tried to be clear that what I'm sharing now is to understand what I'm doing, to give visibility, and it's not ready yet. I'm committed to delivering great software, and when I tell you it's ready you can rest assured that it will work. Understand that I'm one man working on 20 projects simultaneously, with 5+ under active development at any one moment, so release stabilization and cadence will take a little bit to lock in.
- hamdingers 1y ago
  > they catch that stuff every time This is why AI code review continues to be mostly useless in my experience. If you instruct an LLM to make PR comments it will come up with some, every time, even when none are warranted.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    So give them a schema and get them to give a relevance score, then filter below a threshold. Works better than trying to get them not to reply.
    - hamdingers 1y ago
      Seems like sound advice, unfortunate that the developers of the review tools I've had brushes with did not take it.
- jitl 1y ago
  I try to avoid participating in the bullshit economy as much as possible
dawnerd 1y ago
I insta reject. It’s ridiculous how bad it’s made some devs. Are they even testing their work before tossing over the wall?
- scrame 1y ago
  were they before?
  - dawnerd 1y ago
    Yep. Claude/copilot definitely has made people lazy.
  - mrheosuper 1y ago
    I would have a talk to whoever create a PR without testing anything.
lawn 1y ago
We need to normalize to reject crap PRs. If we don't then things will only continue.
whynotminot 1y ago
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.
- jitl 1y ago
  I think the [vibe] is more like, “Watch out this pr is more sus than usual” but usually it’s too sus
virgil_disgr4ce 1y ago
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.
xdennis 1y ago
> 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.
- jitl 1y ago
  I don’t mind a 2000 line PR if it’s quality code written by a human.
dimator 1y ago
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
stillsut 1y ago
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-summary.md#v010 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.

righthand 1y ago

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?

eagerpace 1y ago
I love maintaining my agent file. Yeah, it doesn’t always listen to the instructions, but neither does anyone else.
- hopelite 1y ago
  You are touching on a critical point that I have been amused by at times in these types of conversations; people are hating on AI for doing all the things that people have done and still do. Poor planning, check. No/inadequate documentation, check. Sloppy and janky code, check. Poor practices and methods, check. Poor and miscommunication, check. Poor technical choices, check. What am I missing? Maybe this is just a matter of some of the top tier 100x devs and teams clutching pearls in disgust at having to look at what goes on below Mt Olympus, but this is also not any different to how code quality cratered and is still really poor due to all the outsourcing and H-1B (sorry, all you H-1B hopefuls) insourcing of quantity over quality. I say that without any judgement, but reality simply is that this issue has long been a quantity over quality argument even before AI, and mostly for non-dev reasons as the recent de-qualification of R&D funding revealed and had a marked impact on dev jobs because the C-suite could don't use R&D funding for financial shenanigans. If people want to hate AI, go ahead. People hated and hate on the H-1B abuses and they hate on AI now. I would hope that we can just move beyond griping and mean-girling AI, and get to a point where proper practices and methods are developed to maybe make the outcomes and outputs better. Because again, AI is not going anywhere less than even H-1B and I am sure the C-suite will find some new way to abuse and play financial shenanigans, but it's simply not going away and we need to learn to live with it since it will seemingly only get "better" and faster as it changes at breakneck speeds.
theshrike79 1y ago
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!

bgwalter 1y ago

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.

cedilla 1y ago

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.

sussmannbaka 1y ago
Hey now, there’s a lot of Hello World, Mandelbrots and Ugly Tailwind Dashboards too :o)
greiskul 1y ago
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.
- jfil 1y ago
  A "Shovel Rush"
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
simianwords 1y ago
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.

isaacremuant 1y ago

[flagged]

badgersnake 1y ago
[flagged]

johnjungles 1y ago

PR fatigue is a real thing

lordnacho 1y ago

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.

hopelite 1y ago
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
whatevaa 1y ago
Yeah, sounds about like babysitting a toddler.

siliconc0w 1y ago

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

fzzzy 1y ago
LLMs aren’t deterministic even with a seed.
- jsheard 1y ago
  Doesn't that depend on the implementation? There's a trade-off between performance and determinism for sure, but if determinism is what you want then it should be possible.
  - jb1991 1y ago
    If you fix random seeds, disable dropout, and configure deterministic kernels, you can get reproducible outputs locally. But you still have to control for GPU non-determinism, parallelism, and even library version differences. Some frameworks (like PyTorch) have flags (torch.use_deterministic_algorithms(True)) to enforce this.
- jb1991 1y ago
  This. I’m still amazed how many people don’t understand how this technology actually works. Even those you would think would have a vested interest in understanding it.
- geor9e 1y ago
  what if you set top_p=1, temperature=0, and always run it on the same local hardware
  - daemonologist 1y ago
    Maybe if you run it on CPU. (Maybe on GPU if all batching is disabled, but I wouldn't bet on it.)

haffi112 1y ago

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

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tennisflyi 1y ago

Not really surprising

cs702 1y ago

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. ?

kermatt 1y ago
3. Hire more developers to decode / devibe code, paying double in the end.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  Sure, but by that time you've IPO'd and dumped the bag on the public, founders and seed-round investors make bank and are long gone by then. I'm only half-joking: personally I'll be looking very closely at the IPO prospectus of any company founded in/after 2024 or so, to know how much vibe coding risk I can expect in its long-term prospects.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
you'll be retired by 3, good luck kids
anonymousiam 1y ago
1. Replace junior developers with AI, reducing costs today. 2. ? 3. Profit! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts
Spivak 1y ago
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.
pyuser583 1y ago
It worked with COBOL.

FpUser 1y ago

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.

chris_pie 1y ago
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.
x3n0ph3n3 1y ago
It comes from people not checking the results thoroughly and taking a YOLO approach to it.
andromaton 1y ago
Coined by Andrej Karpathy

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Related: The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45235458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45235458

dwheeler 1y ago

Using AI assistants != Vibe Coding. AI can be a helpful assistant but they are nowhere near ready for letting loose when the results matter.

stavros 1y ago
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.
DeepYogurt 1y ago
Brother most of them ain't even assisting. Management just forces it.

matthewfcarlson 1y ago

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.

EdwardDiego 1y ago
At least your two year old learns.

gxs 1y ago

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

wewewedxfgdf 1y ago

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.

faangguyindia 1y ago

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 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.

neilv 1y ago

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?

jennyholzer 1y ago
> 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
izabera 1y ago
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 it's so incredibly productive
Izkata 1y ago
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.

samgranieri 1y ago

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?

turtletontine 1y ago
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-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
- srcreigh 1y ago
  > We do not provide evidence that: > AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers > AI systems in the near future will not speed up developers in our exact setting > There are not ways of using existing AI systems more effectively to achieve positive speedup in our exact setting
  - Wowfunhappy 1y ago
    I don't understand how it doesn't provide evidence for the first of these. Sure you can't necessarily extrapolate to all software developers but it's still evidence just not proof.
askonomm 1y ago
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.
- jennyholzer 1y ago
  I agree with this almost completely

the_unsender 1y ago

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

the_unsender 1y ago

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.

INTPenis 1y ago

We're training our own replacement.

wnc3141 1y ago
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-university-lays-off-79-it-workers-after-they-train-h-1b-replacements/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-universit...

bodhi_mind 1y ago

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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

foota 1y ago

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.

sys_64738 1y ago

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

fcpguru 1y ago

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.

AstroBen 1y ago
A few minutes crafting a prompt to save weeks Thats like a 2000x productivity boost. AI is amazing
- filoeleven 1y ago
  Citation needed.
  - AstroBen 1y ago
    ...the parent comment
artisin 1y ago
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.

NoPicklez 1y ago

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.

anon22981 1y ago

What I’ve seen also happen is senior devs suddenly starting to put out garbage code and PRs. One senior dev in our project has become a menace and the quality of his work has dramatically dropped.