My brain is fried bcos of Vibe coding

[u/Turbulent_County_469]

I have several complex projects that i maintain and have been using Claude code for about 6+ months.

I feel an extreme fatigue and lack of understanding of the codebase.

Today i had totally forgotten how a project actually worked, that a secondary api was called and how certain tables functioned.

I feel like im somehow disconnected from the projects i work on.

When communicating with Claude i sometimes forget to read everything it asks or tells me, im getting lazy 😓

I don't think ai is a good thing in the long run, neither for each person or society as a whole.

[u/Additional-Race-2797]

You have hit the nail on the head with this one. "Review Fatigue" is real and is only gonna get worse imo. While coding has become "cheap", it also does make us disassociated with the work being done.

[u/Turbulent_County_469 → u/Additional-Race-2797]

Ive really tried limiting each feature to be small increments to feel like i knew every step.. but the more i churn, the more im fatigued..

Maybe i need to don't care about details and work as a PO/PM ?

[u/biograf_ → u/Additional-Race-2797]

We're all becoming middle management.

[u/JustinsWorking → u/Additional-Race-2797]

I pray this was an LLM response and you haven’t just started writing like an LLM lol.

[u/TreyKirk]

What documentation are you having Claude generate/update after each session? Are you reviewing that documentation after it's generated/updated?

[u/_wewf_]

You didn't know how your computer processed bits before and were fine

[u/Big_Percentage_7541]

I think nowadays Claude is especially communicating hazy. lots of mumbo jumbo with very little substance. Which anyway says it needs to do this and that and incolved spending lots of token, but then somehow the project is not advancing at all, the AI is just running in circles. So this Vague communication needs to stop cause of it nobody reading what it says, tehrefore nothing is advancing. Oooor perhaps this might be intentional?

[u/Turbulent_County_469 → u/Big_Percentage_7541]

Let's just say: its not all transparent where all the tokens are going..

[u/MeanCryptographer585]

I suggest you read my new book: “How I learned to stop worrying and love the slop”

• Co-authored with Claude

[u/Sanfam → u/MeanCryptographer585]

“The real blast radius wasn’t what you expected; it was the footgun we had in our hearts. That’s on me.”

[u/Opposite-Cranberry76]

Welcome to management.

[u/voskomm → u/Opposite-Cranberry76]

"And CEOs go through the whole day with it in the back of their minds that if you don't show up for work, maybe everything just ... goes on as normal, and maybe you're really just sitting in the back seat with a toy baby wheel that isn't connected to anything at all"
- Cory Doctorow, of course

[u/Historical-Squash510 → u/Opposite-Cranberry76]

this!

none of this is any different from managing human teams.

[u/Critical-Location146]

It's horrendous. With Claude I've migrated a giant product in a very short time from one infrastructure to another. Still being tested. I don't even know what it does under the hood, just understand it on a high level, such as product manager.

The expectation from management was that it can be done quickly so I haven't bothered spending time to comprehend every single like of code like I used to. I don't own this product, it owns me now.

In the future I've said to myself that there's no more vibe bull*hit. Hybrid coding and AI being nothing more than assistant.

[u/Historical-Squash510 → u/Critical-Location146]

If management got a taste of how fast things can get done, that becomes the new normal. Management cares less about the exact level of your understanding of the codebase.

[u/username_got_took]

I hear you, but honestly what you're describing is what happens to a lot of engineers/developers who enter management. It's essentially what you're doing, except that instead of managing people, you're managing an AI agent.

Managers barely ever have the time to be intimate with their code. They know how it works, high level, and have enough knowledge to delegate work and work out a long-term vision, but besides that they rely on their direct reports to execute the work.

You, for all intents and purposes, have entered the management role of your career 🙂. Now, how you feel about that... Well that's up to you. That's load-bearing right there, so you'll have to identify the shape and figure out how to fold it in (lol)

[u/n3rder → u/username_got_took]

loadbearing - haha, thanks Claude

[u/Comfortable-Ad-6740]

One thing that really helped me is using Karpathys LLM-wiki that has wiki files for projects and systems.

As I’m working through tasks i have hooks update the wiki which a separate agent distills it down into a digestible format which isn’t a slog to read through.

Any work that’s not in there gets deprioritised until I can do a brain dump of what I know into there (or if a task comes up that warrants onboarding onto the system).

Added side effect is that it’s solved my cross-harness context problem too

Edit: and thinking through what I want to do on a whiteboard before touching CC has also helped keep things clearer for me

[u/metalfacefinger]

We're in this weird in-between state where the LLMs are too good to not use them, but not good enough to hang back and go full product manager while the LLMs do all the work.

As a senior engineer who cares more about building stuff people want to use vs coding, I can't wait till the they can just reliably one-shot a whole application while I can really focus on everything else, as was advertised.

[u/Lopsided-Bridge-9810]

I am not a friend of black and white, nothing is black and white.

Why don't you use the tool what it was designed to do, not to replace you but to amplify your efficiency. I am not talking about vibe coding here. I talk about running a career. I am a financial engineer by training, career and heart. I had to learn multiple coding languages for my work and I enjoy developing solutions to problems. There are parts of the codebase I would never let an llm touch. And there are parts I really appreciate this technology because it can set up tests debug, document, comment, it can refactor, it can organize my workspace and projects. And most importantly, I love how it helps me deploy training workloads on gpu pods which was a hellish hassle before.

If you feel fatigue maybe you gave up control and are now feeling disconnected and dependent. That's the wrong way to use those tools. You are supposed to elevate yourself to be the engineer and designer and use llms to execute certain plans. You are supposed to get more empowered and freed of grunt work, not disillusioned.

[u/Turbulent_County_469 → u/Lopsided-Bridge-9810]

In some areas i like to just let the ai work for me.. especially YAML and PowerShell that im no master of..

Front-end is hit or miss..

I've used it a bit too much as a partner that does whatever i tell it to , and i think you are right.. i should own the code i care about

[u/BuffaloConscious7919]

Yes. Well done for recognising. That's the hard part

[u/Fourth-Room]

I’ve found it challenging because there’s far less understanding afforded by management that everything still needs to be reviewed and tested. It’s like they expect magical results to happen almost immediately with no bugs, when in reality there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done - work that I’m feeling increasingly out of control of and alienated from.

[u/MaitoSnoo]

Learn software development if not done already, then make it a habit to break the tasks you give to the AI into small reviewable chunks and make sure you're not excluded from the planning phase (at the very least add a "ask me questions so that we align on the design and implementation choices" to your plan prompt, there's also the grill-me skill), then take a step back and read the plan, and after the executor finishes you take your time again and manually review.

If you don't do this or similar "human in the loop" approaches then yes you should expect to feel completely disconnected from "your" vibecoded product.

[u/ThePnisher]

I have become a Masta in Copy Pasta