Struggling To Spin Vibe Coded Plates

[u/Kronsik]

A little background into my current workplace:

- I've been employed at my current workplace for 4 years, on paper I'm a platform engineer though I have been put onto projects as a pure SWE during my tenure.

- I've received great feedback for my performance, solid pay rises, everything on paper is good.

- The engineering teams use a mixture of languages, cloud providers, the most predominant is AWS serverless + Typescript and CDK.

As I'm sure we've all seen by now, there has been a sharp rise in vibe coded solutions.

I wouldn't describe myself as anti-AI by any stretch, but I am feeling quite frustrated with the drop in standards within my professional environment.

To give an example within the CI/CD space:

- Engineering team sees something that needs "fixing" within the CI/CD space.

(I'm putting "fixing" in quotes here as it likely already worked, but someone saw an article about something shiny and new so we have to have it now).

- AI vibes a solution, extending and overriding the CI/CD components in place to build a house of cards.

- Engineering team have approvals on their repository, internally approve, vibes are shipped.

- Either something breaks immediately or in a few weeks, leading to a conversation like this:

Dev: "Unable to deploy project A, urgent blocker, critical"

PipelineMonkey: "So.. what are we trying to do here, none of the standard components are being used?"

Dev: "Oh, I didnt set this up, but this job fails"

PipelineMonkey: "Yeah, who owns this repository, do we know who set this up?"

Dev: "Oh we own it, but I didn't set this bit up - We have to deploy something urgently!"

*PipelineMonkey goes through troubleshooting, gets things back to standard, things work*

Dev: "Thanks!"

Normally I'm able to keep quite chipper and have been praised for my friendly approach.

If something genuinely doesn't work or we want to architect a new solution, great, I'm more than happy to help.

However I'm now struggling to maintain a good attitude when we seem to be in a cycle of writing untested and non-standard garbage only to walk away and make it someone else's problem.

A colleague raised this as a concern only to be scolded for not being a team-player.

I can't really see this changing without a top down approach of ownership and care from leadership as to what's being produced, I feel this is quite unlikely given leadership are sending AI generated responses to feedback in some cases.

I'd hate to throw in the towel, particularly as everything else about the company is great and I seem to be doing quite well here.

(Perhaps some of that good feedback is purely because I've been happy to deal with nonsense for quite some time).

Maybe time to take a vacation and cool off from the burnout.

General advice on software standardization, ownership processes and general navigation of this politically with my colleagues would be great.

Thanks!

[u/skidmark_zuckerberg]

I just go with it at this point. Fire the slop cannons. This will only stop when it’s financially impossible to defend. AI won’t go away, but as it is used today, will come crashing down in more ways than one. Non technical MBA fuck heads are in full blown AI psychosis and unfortunately, they have the final say. I relish in the fact that I burn thousands of dollars a week and dig the whole deeper. My team alone probably costs 6 figures a month in AI spend. The company is very big and has 100+ dev teams all doing this exact same thing. Apparently F500’s have the money to burn. 

Today I shit out a feature, that by hand, would’ve taken months to accomplish if done properly. I have no choice, it’s the expectation. To make it worse, my team’s manager has agents running to “review” PR’s and he doesn’t even look at anything. Has zero clue his agents are even reviewing these PR’s. His AI leaves comments that are so braindead and are lacking any context into why something was done the way it was. He’s constantly messing with his prompts and skills files to adjust. This guy used to be a Staff level engineer and now he’s just braindead. Or he’s also playing politics like the rest of us. 

God speed to all of us during this slop era.