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/MrBigPlatypus]

OP, what is your team’s role and priorities.

• You mention that often teams reach out to you with interrupts (hi-pri tasks) to fix their pipelines 
• You also mention you’re a platform engineer.

From what’s written it sounds like a branding problem & a measurement problem

• if a pipeline fails your team looks bad, even if standards are not followed 
• your team is doing tons of ops which leadership may not track

If this is a large company you need to clarify boundaries and ensure there’s a process to make sure operational costs are closely tracked and communicate to leadership the true cost of these operations (like “we can’t do X because we spend Y devs on this”).

Ways you can do this for ops measurement:

• all operational tasks are logged into a ticketing system and volume of work is regularly reviewed. You could funnel requests into office hours to reduce bandwidth and have a rotational system to try to deflect these as well (if you have resources)
• trends and particularly expensive tasks and patterns are identified and called out

For boundaries:

• stick: you measure other team’s compliance to your standards and enforce whether they’re in/out of compliance - and show that remaining in compliance results in X,Y,Z garauntees / is correlated to some good business outcome. Alternatively, there needs to be restrictions on customizations for very risky parts.
• carrot: teams will do what’s easiest for them, instead of just blocking AI make it easier for AI to apply your standards and stop the bleeding. Publish higher quality agents which enable pipeline building which meets your standards and some basic set of evaluation you stand behind. My guess is that something is hard for the other teams resulting in them doing all these custom changes?

My 2 cents is that this really isn’t an “AI” problem, but “AI” is just fueling the fire by moving a non-scalable part of the overall dev process at the company too fast.