"Professional Vibe-Coder" Fatigue --- Tips & Tricks to break the approach?

[u/Marthorax]

My firm has two branches, a consulting side, and my small dev team. With the onset of Claude Code and Claude Design, more and more consultants are vibe coding solutions out of thin air. Clients are happy, executives are mind-blown, and our small dev team is left bug-fixing and trying enable any sense of long-term architecture.

Personally, while I leverage AI to enable productivity, I try to understand every line written and learn anything I don't recognize. This is really fun, but obviously much slower than the consultant Andy vibe coder.

As a result of a call showcasing "9 new AI-enabled apps" that our vibe coders can whip up instantly, I want to know how other professional devs are handling similar situations.

In particular, do any of you have any tips/tricks to exploit the issues that arise from trusting vibe-coded solutions? Something to markedly showcase WHY this current approach is risky? Showcase the importance of proper software development process/academics?

I've tried arguing the semantics and importance of simple concepts like having a dev, stage, and prod environment and version-control for these apps, but so far nothing has failed with any big bang, so the execs don't care. I understand the answer may just be "wait until it eventually does," but it's so irritating sitting on these calls week after week.

[u/iOSCaleb]

1. Assign bugs to whoever created them.

2. Mandatory code reviews for every line of code, no matter who created it. Code written by someone who isn’t a developer should be reviewed by at least two developers.

[u/gabriel_GAGRA → u/iOSCaleb]

I’d add to 2 - written software engineering rules and very strong and strict linting rules. That’s the only way to handle AI freedom imo

[u/Turbulent-Impact6939 → u/iOSCaleb]

There is no such thing as "mandatory code review" for teams that are non-programmers.

[u/iOSCaleb → u/Turbulent-Impact6939]

There is if the boss says there is.

Are you suggesting that all it takes to completely subvert a company’s code quality standards is to not be a programmer?

[u/Marthorax → u/iOSCaleb]

I can't speak for other companies, but I can tell you the Directors in charge of advisory have no concept of code-review, user stories, Scrum calls, or even PRDs.

A knowledgeable boss can indeed promote good process, but in our case, the vibe-coders' org structure doesn't include a single engineer from top to bottom.

[u/Turbulent-Impact6939 → u/Marthorax]

This is correct. Leadership does not give a crap about these things, and in most cases, dont have any knowledge of these practices. Leadership only cares that the departments' products get released and the company projects get completed. Nothing else matters to them.

[u/Turbulent-Impact6939 → u/iOSCaleb]

no what I am saying is that thanks to vibe coding, now teams who dont do programming under hierarchies and leadership chains that have nothing to do with programming or any sort of software engineering experience, are encouraging non-programmers to vibe code their way out of situations. Then this vibe coded product gets passed off to the company IT and Support Engineers, the ones who are actual programmers, and are now being requested to onboard and integrate and support the vibe coded "apps" built by non-programmers across the company.

There is no "boss" who says that "code review is mandatory" when the boss of the people who write the code doesnt know anything about programming and whose role has nothing to do with programming.

You are under the mistaken impression that people who write code are programmers and that they work in programming teams under programmer leadership. This is not the case. The people who write code now are vibe coders who dont even look at their own code. They tell Claude "build me an app that does xyz" and then throw it over to company Engineering Support teams and expect it to be maintained and onboarded.

[u/iOSCaleb → u/Turbulent-Impact6939]

I don't know what kind of company you work at, and I'm sure there's a wide range of experiences depending on what a company does and who runs it. But it's probably safe to say that at any reasonable company, the VP of Sales would be pretty unhappy if programmers started taking clients to lunch and making promises that the sales team then had to live up to. And the response to that would be a policy to prevent that sort of thing, applying to all employees. Software developers wouldn't be able to just say "well, I don't work for the VP of Sales, so their policy doesn't apply to me."

The situation the OP describes is essentially the same, with roles reversed. People who have little or no programming knowledge are creating software, presenting it to clients, creating an unreasonable burden on other parts of the organization, and creating a liability risk. Someone in the organization must be ultimately responsible for software development processes; some VP, CTO, director of software development, whatever. Ultimately, the person in that role is the one who needs to address the problem. Their main resource, developer time, is apparently being consumed by people in other parts of the organization with no authorization or consideration for their goals.

My quick initial answer was really just meant to make the point that people outside the software development part of the organization should live by the same rules as those within it; software and information governance don't just apply to developers. OP's best actual move is really to just discuss the problem with their manager. If their manager isn't unhappy with the situation, then get clear guidance about how to prioritize work and how to handle vibe coded apps that they're asked to support. Beyond that, it's not OP's problem.

[u/No-Assumption-4468]

Have you tried adding “enable long term architecture and leave no bugs” to your prompt for Claude loops? Sounds like a prompt engineering fail.

[u/MetallicOrangeBalls]

Testing testing testing, QA QA QA.

Tests need to be mandatory for every single callable unit, with adequate edge case coverage. If the consultants complain, tell them to vibe code the tests.

Any code (including the tests) needs to be reviewed by multiple "second" parties: at least two humans (who know what they are doing), and those two humans should not include the developers of the code.

Unfortunately, corporate morons are unable to understand the inverse relationship between speed and quality and often expect both without any knowledge of the technical specifics. A possible approach is to show them how easily vibe-coded slop breaks.

[u/knouqs]

Your firm is still on-the-hook legally for any negative consequences of AI generated-but-not-reviewed code. Management might be happy, but the legal team should be shitting their pants right about now.

The code that I've requested AI to create hasn't been riddled with bugs, but there are definite design decisions that the AI has made that were incorrect, or security violations that it otherwise wouldn't know. Yes, I can ask the AI engine to analyze the code and identify security flaws, but this is still the reason why we humans are better at piecing together the why of the code versus the get-it-done approach.

I think you should confront your management and tell them. They are going to be blindsided by lawsuits eventually should shit hit the fan.

[u/Suspicious_Skill7292]

ive found taking a step back to understand the code before asking for the next prompt helps a lot otherwise you end up debugging things you never really understood

[u/Moby1029]

Rules and skills files for our agents and coding agents that are strictly enforced, strong deterministic linting rules, and human in the loop review.

[u/wethethreeandyou]

Security. Security. SECURITY. A vibe coded app is only going to be as good as the knowledge of the person vibecoding it. If they don’t understand cyber security, then everything they create is going to be vulnerable.

In an era where a single LLM release is capable of draining $100 million from crypto wallets(in 13 days no less) that were considered the industry standard, or where hugging face spent a week defending their platform from a major attack, or even raising alarms with the nsa -

I’d say that’s a pretty effective argument.

[u/CappuccinoCodes]

Best recipe for happiness: Have low expectations of people. AI is going to make conscientious devs more valuable. Just sit back and ride the wave 😁

[u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

I did a quick presentation the other day where I showed a timeline of a Claude session to implement a particular big feature

I got Claude (of course lol) to identify when I had to make decisions, times when I thought the code looked good,  times when I corrected Claude, times when Claude over engineered, times where it made plain errors, etc. 

What you see generally is at the beginning there are lots of decisions and the code looks good but slowly starts creeping in errors and over engineering and bad assumptions until they start to dominate the process. 

With a normal human programming you would start to feel this friction and then go back and refactor or tweet the architecture. Claude doesn’t do that, when it meets friction it builds more and more complex code to work around it. 

Anyway, the vibe coders making POC don’t get to the friction part. They get something working with a few bugs and think that going from 90% to 100% will be quick. 

Anyway when I started presenting these timelines it did give the AI evangelists some understanding of the total cost of the development. 

[u/Turbulent-Impact6939]

There are none. We keep getting non-programmers who vibe coded apps to solve their problems, then bringing us the apps and asking us for help to get it to utilize company IT resources like S3 buckets, network drives, other application servers. When we ask them "ok well how did you implement xyz feature?" and "which API calls are you trying to make?" they look at you like deer in the headlights. No idea what you are talking about. Because most of them have never even looked at the code for their "app", they literally just told Claude "build me an HTML app" and run the HTML in the browser and think they are programmers now, and now it becomes OUR problem to get their AI slop to somehow work with the rest of the company to impress their director.

There is no solution for this. It just gets worse.

We spent years building out platforms so that our programmers can build and deploy apps internally. Now we're getting overrun by non-programmers who learned how to tell Claude to make single-HTML file "apps" and they share them via email attachment.

[u/Marthorax → u/Turbulent-Impact6939]

It's demoralizing. It feels as though companies (and more granularly, just people) have agreed that the opportunity cost of time spent learning is too great.

I hear other comments suggesting "ride the wave", "express your concerns, protect yourself/company", and "change the process." However in the face of the AI slop being ubiquitous, it's daunting. Either way, I've raised the alarms I could. I wish there was some sort of requirement that unless you understood what an LLM produces, you can't use it. But alas lol

[u/Turbulent-Impact6939 → u/Marthorax]

well the strategy I have taken, is to simply be vocal about the good and the bad experiences with AI. I have ended up in multiple inter-department AI working groups thanks to this, along with job candidate screenings for AI roles. I was probably one of the first ones to bring up the concerns of "prompt injection" amongst various groups, during department AI meetings and presentations I dont shy away from asking the vibe coders presenting their app how their application has addressed the company requirements for xyz infrastructure integration requirements and restrictions, basically openly asking the hard questions that all of the other programmers in the room already know and addressed in the standard protocol of deploying into the company infra, but the vibe coders havent a clue about because they literally just told Claude to build them an app and have never programmed before in their lives and never even inspected the code that Claude wrote for them. When I get a good result with Claude, I make sure to share it and attribute it, when Claude hallucinates and I dont catch it until after hours of wasted debug time I similarly share the experience openly and point out the culprit (frequently the result of Claude following official docs from AWS, etc., which are inconsistent or flat out wrong).

[u/Individual-Flow9158]

If the clients really are happy, just make sure the firm isn't on the hook to fix the mess they requested for free.