It is heavily normalized in industry now.

I quit a job that added AI use to performance reviews super early. That was pure bureaucratic cancer and most of my good coworkers burned out and left. I don’t think I’ll ever work for a big corp again, I actually like my work so much more now.

At work I’m expected to use it, our clients want it, my boss likes that he can feel technical when writing tickets (they’re mostly wrong though, and the tickets solution instead of report and request). It genuinely can do some useful tasks that make sense to use it for.

There are real pros and cons, but there’s no putting this back in the bottle. Philosophically I do hate it and everything it stands for, but practically it has allowed me to do a lot that I couldn’t (and wouldn’t) before.

The only good solution I’ve found is that you have to get your hands dirty and stay in the weeds. You cannot let it run off and do what it wants, you have to drive and then tag it in. When you vibe code something you’ll find yourself in three weeks resolving an issue and going “wait, it does what?!”, and of course, arguing with the gibberish Claude or GPT claims is English but is actually the first stage of model collapse as the models reinforcement train on ever more distilled data. Plus, skill atrophy is real. Decide which skills to allow to atrophy carefully.

AI code review is good and useful. I used to use it as a first wave for obvious stuff, but it is actually decent and high trust now. Saves me some time on that.

It’s good at finding bugs and security issues, and one thing I actually really like is having it model a system as a state machine and enumerate all the possible states to find bugs — especially concurrency bugs. I don’t work in a provable language, so this is hugely helpful.

I would be very hesitant to take a role where they push vibe coding or “agentic fleets” or loops or whatever. If you’re babysitting 6 Claude code sessions you aren’t working and you’re not in the loop on any of them. That will accumulate as tech debt and bog you down over time. It’ll suck your soul dry. It’s miserable.

Reading the slop and reviewing it “software factory” style is a very bad sign to me.

Some code is throwaway or disposable, vibing that makes sense to me. But the core work is more important than ever. Maybe the disposable code is the new part, I look at it like installing an IKEA kitchen, it’s slop, but it looks nice, the important part is the foundation and level flooring that enables the slop to stand up.