Using AI codegen feels like returning to a beginner all over again. Throwing shit at a wall, begging the AI to cooperate, getting frustrated because nothing works and I can't do anything to fix it because none of the code is mine.

I swear this was a phase I grew out of after years of dedicated practice. Now I'm forced back into it again.

I'm a full time code monkey. Last week I met a woman who created an on-line app. I asked her, "Oh, you must be a software engineer!" She laughed and said, no - she made it with Claude in about six months.

I felt a little deflated. This, the job I studied for, got a Masters degree in, working full time. It's being supplanted by someone with no experience and an idea.

Of course, the site was buggy with UI issues, but it still stick in my craw a bit.

AI codegen is dumb as fuck. It doesn't understand system design at all.

I do use it to catch careless mistakes in nonformal connected parts of code though.

If you know what you're doing and you know what good patterns look like then AI is a very good way to take some shortcuts and not have to write all the code yourself. It also keeps getting better. This is a super unpopular opinion on Lemmy, but I've been doing this job for 25 years and AI has only sped it up.

On the other end of vibe coding you have people who would never touch a compiler in their life if it wasn't for AI, who are building practical, useful things in the real world. I think because Lemmy is so full of tech people that we often forget the tech serves larger purposes than just having nice code.

I think it's also helpful to remember that short of an entire societal collapse we will never stop using these tools and they will only get better. The monolithic systems that are in place running the world are not going to change anytime soon. Even if we encounter a major correction of some sort these tools will only come back better and cheaper. You will never get everyone in the world to agree on regulation and at least one nation will march forward with progress unabated. You can hate the tech companies, the governments, the rich, the stupid, the right wing, the left wing, it doesn't matter. We are locked on a course.

I am working in a very small company as a software dev and write everything by hand. I wrote some weeks ago in a different thread here that I tried all of the LLM powered coding tools and found all of them subpar.

If this company goes downhill or I lose the job otherwise, I will work something entirely different.

My very arrogant point of view is that these "vibecoding" tools are being celebrated by people who were making shit software before and now make software that is slightly less shit in what they perceive is the same amount of time, but I suspect it takes them actually longer. Meanwhile, they don't grow their programming skills at all.

From what I can observe, yeah, pretty much the entire industry has shifted to LLM code generation. I'm sure (or at least I hope) there are still some shops that go out of their way to keep working like we did, you know, months ago. But beyond that... I'm not even sure the general public understands how quickly and how fully LLM codegen has become the norm. It's grim.

One question I have for the slop advocates in this thread is this - do you not like programming? Did you fall for the „learn to code“ meme and just learned the bare minimum to get a paycheque working on web dashboards?

Like why would you voluntarily cut out the most enjoyable part of the job, and go around scoffing at people who don’t want to do that?

Productivity is my boss’s problem, not mine, and I’d rather go and try and farm geese (I hate geese) than spend my whole day reading LLM generated code.

If you work for a company that prioritizes profit over quality - yes.

I no longer work in government IT, but from what I have heard from old colleagues, quality is still prioritized there and they are not forced to vibe code.

I read a retrospective from another team yesterday. They were preparing a demo for leadership and apparently it didn't go so well. There were many reasons like last minute changes in requirements but one line was interesting for this discussion: The use of the LLM agents caused confusion about who is fixing which bug and taking on which tasks. The agents act like they're alone in the codebase and keep adding and changing code broadly whenever they see an opportunity for improvement. And that often without specifically being prompted to do so. Now if you have multiple team members collaborating on a project with each their agents, chaos ensues because the agents are not coordinating and the diffs/commits become insane and the team doesn't fully understand them.

This actually results in a necessity to test more and longer because nobody knows which bugs have really been fixed now and rapidly preparing for a release or a demo becomes more difficult than before.

In my opinion an LLM can be very useful to rapidly prototype something. Especially with an API or language you're not familiar with. But for Production it's still a huge risk to push code you don't understand.

I'm a systems architect who uses agentic coding to get around some executive dysfunction challenges with writing my own code. I learned about the dysfunction late in life; maybe meds will eventually get me to a point where I can consistently work on a personal code project without a looming deadline or social contract in the loop. For now I am part of the problem. Hi!

I look at agentic coding as a firearms problem:

• it lowers the barrier to execution: anyone with sloppy aim can point and pull the trigger, and do a lot of harm in the process
• both perform better in the hands of people with discipline and experience, but that doesn't change the fact that LLMs and guns have massively proliferated and any idiot can get their hands on one (or that shitty people benefit from mass producing them)
• the industrial complex producing guns profits from murder, and the industrial complex producing datacenters profit from murder of the environment and attempts to eliminate jobs
• the same countries who treat gun control as an anathema tend to view "AI" controls as an anathema
• analogies suck, they're never perfect but they get the conversation started

That said, most of the people who hate LLMs also don't know a damn thing about how they're used correctly. It's also not their fault. Sure, they're under no obligation to be an expert about the thing that's harming them. But there's a bigger reason: the companies pushing this shit benefit from a world stage where people use them wastefully and inefficiently.

The short list of things most people don't get:

I could add another ten bullet points here, but I'm not here to prove that LLMs are capable of being useful. I'm here to demonstrate that it requires knowledge of a problem domain to get the best results. That means you can't get rid of employees familiar with the knowledge domain. You need senior employees to get the best results, and you need junior employees so that they can eventually become senior employees. Same as it ever was. But because we've got useless fucking politicians who are too busy lining their own pockets instead of, I don't know, regulating a worldwide memory shortage caused by a handful of companies, the whole thing is cannibalization of human society all the way down.

We could have scaled this to operate in the consumer space at a fraction of the energy costs (Apple SOC style versus energy inefficient hyperscaling) and used it as something to generate value by augmenting the capabilities of individual workers instead of trying to replace them wholesale. It only makes sense that it should have benefitted everyone considering this tech was built on shoving libraries worth of human achievement into a training pipeline (often without permission), right?

Nah. They profit more if we don't own our own compute and everyone is encouraged to burn energy on treating the LLMs like all-knowing oracles instead of research tooling. They control the access to creations built on stolen knowledge. But hey, if everything else gets burned down in the process at least they come out on the other side rich and bailed out.

it's not gonna last. if you tune out of the hype and actually look at some hard data, vibecoding stops looking so hot: https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/08/12/ai-software-development-what-does-the-data-say/

the current token costs are unsustainable also. the only ones making bank right now are the shovel sellers: https://isaiprofitable.com/

personally i'm working on hand-rewriting several projects vibecoded out by a non-dev in a small shop. not only is a lot of this straight up broken nonsense, the amount of tech debt is staggering. previous job wasn't better, i had to spend more time fixing slop from former coworkers than actually introducing new features. keep your skills sharp and persevere. we'll get through this.

tl;dr: this, too, shall pass. but holy shit.

Work at a saas company in silicon valley, pretty much all the code being written is from an LLM here. Everything is still reviewed by humans, and a bunch of rounds of LLM reviews as well though.

Productivity has gone up as far as I can tell, we are shipping more features with a smaller staff. Support cases also seem to be going down, at least ones that reach an engineer like me since a lot are being resolved earlier in the escalation chain by a support technician, or just the customer talking to the built in helper LLM in the product.

Our token spend is pretty high though, looking like I'm at $1,200 on the month so far, so there's that but don't hear to many complaints from the finance department yet...

I'm liking the transition, as I have less work now. My day is a lot more waiting on the AI to complete a task or waiting for a human reviewer to do a pass on the code so I can spend more of my time doing important things, like scrolling on lemmy.

As for the future, I don't think this is going away as much as everyone else in this thread seems to be wish casting for that to happen. The coding agents and models are only getting better, and tokens will only get cheaper as the data centers come on line. Long term I've been looking into becoming an electrician, but for now the economics don't make sense with my current salary, so sticking with it until they lay me off...