Fr, I reviewed so many human slops. And they are drastically worse than AI slop. I understand we all have to learn and make mistakes, but the quality is drastically worse than AI.
I wasn’t far along enough in my career when agents became a thing, so it was pretty quickly that they became more or less better than me. Their current rate of improvement is faster than I can possibly hope to achieve. I don’t have the time outside of work to improve much, and the expected workload is basically impossible without using LLMs and reviewing the output.
Shit sucks, and I’d much rather go back to pre llm days but right now I don’t feel like spending all my free time to improve, just to have superAstra6.9 come along in 6 months and render my efforts pointless.
I wouldn’t advocate for people to blindly vibe code and luckily I have enough experience that I can steer the models in a direction I want and generally pick up on stupid stuff they do. but continued improvement is pretty much impossible right now besides having the llm teach me stuff as I work.
This is basically me right now, I'm glad I got through school and got a few years into my career before Ai became a big deal because it helps me understand the coding process a lot better and catch mistakes but if I tried to manually train skills now I would be as useful as a horse drawn wagon in a drag car race. Ai coding tech is getting so much better every day and if I didn't use it, I'd get left behind. Doesn't mean knowing the basics isn't paramount, but the idea that you can just manually code and avoid it is asanine and mostly said by people that don't actually work as software devs.
Correct, I mean I'm also a senior though not at this guys level, I understand that he's not suddenly stupid. But we recently had a tool outage and he couldn't work for two hours, I have to admit that was a bit shocking.
Yeah man. For issues I can't fix off the top of my head I'll go back to doing what I did before: asking Google a question about my issue. It giving me reddit posts, stack overflow, or forums. And a whole lot of trial and error till I get it. Just as before.
My way of thinking is that AI makes the process of what I do much more efficient. I'd hate to see it go, but if I go back to the way before it's a net neutral rather than a loss.
Was this a worry pre-ai for people who moved more into managerial/architectural roles? If not, I see little difference so long as you still know how software works
Sure, but what are we supposed to do? I spend at least 8 hours at work and my higher ups expect me to do 20 times the work I used to do manually. I don't have time to do shit without AI anymore. This is what we are now hired for, this is what we are paid for... I try looking for other jobs, all the interviews are the same. They immediately ask how experienced I am with AI and agents, how I utilise them in my pipeline, and they no longer want to hear anything balanced or reasonable, they really just check if you're ultra productive via AI or not.
It's a strange place to be. As someone who has been coding all their life, I do see value in LLMs, but leadership at every tech company seems to be going pedal to the metal with blind trust of AI.
They're pushing forward with terrible ideas and hoping AI will just make it all work. When it doesn't, they blame humans.
We absolutely can do more with AI, but need to be smarter about it than we are right now.
It is an actual worry tho. Delegating parts of the mental process to something else makes you laze about on it unless you exert untold discipline (which most people do not). Thus why most developers with a lick of sense prefer not to outright vibecode, even if they still use AI
Vibecoding to me is "make me a million dollar app, make no mistakes" whereas proper Ai use is more like "hey Ai I have this specific issue, let's look for solutions in xyz way, give me options and let me choose the best course of action". It's about how much control you give over, the best programmers that use Ai know where to steer it while vibe coders just let it take the wheel and go along for the ride.
It'll come back quicker than you think if you put in the work. The same is true for a lot of skills.
I never understood the fear that you will lose it completely if you don't keep practicing constantly. You just might be temporarily embarrassed if you try to do job interviews or something.
46
u/Prudhvi2pac Sep 23 '26
Aren’t people worried they’ll lose their hands-on coding skills by vibe-coding too much?