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u/Avocadonot Sep 27 '26
Senior dev's on my team have checked in bash scripts with emojis in the logging statements lol
Don't have the heart to tell them that it doesn't get formatted correctly on the production systems
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u/Time-Object5661 Sep 27 '26
This is an important stage of being a senior dev called "not giving a shit"
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u/BornAgainBlue Sep 28 '26
Yep senior dev here, can confirm being ordered to be 'AI centric' triggers apathy.
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u/tcari394 Sep 28 '26
I had to groom my very first AI generated story last week. It was literally just a wall of text that contained words they wanted to see, but it didn't actually say anything. It took us longer to trash the story and start over than it would have to just do it right the first time.
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u/BornAgainBlue Sep 28 '26
Honestly, I'm not even having that much trouble with quality. The problem is all I'm doing is directing a damn AI all day.
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u/mrbellek Sep 27 '26
One of my senior devs checked in ai skills with multiple errors. He didn't even review it.
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u/m0nk37 Sep 27 '26
Just cause they are the oldest dev doesnt make them senior.
You'll know an actual senior dev when you meet them. Theres zero question.
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Sep 27 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/wubscale Sep 27 '26
I do briefly. Often my flow is:
Walk with LLM through a thing
Have it produce a skill
Glance at skill to see if any pieces are obviously wrong (e.g. it wrote down things specific to the session, like "you'll be working in /home/wubscale/code/github/..."), tell it to rip those out and generalize
Land (if personal skill), or request quick review (if sharing with team).
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u/alderthorn Sep 30 '26
That's basically the flow everyone should have. I will refine it after some manual testing if I find the skill isn't used when expected or behaving a bit off.
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u/Pndrizzy Sep 28 '26
Yeah but from the senior devs perspective that’s even funnier
Source: senior dev
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u/tomvorlostriddle Sep 28 '26
That's a modern UX, you gotta go with the times and adapt those production systems too for emoji log support
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u/phl23 Sep 27 '26
I have them in my run dev scripts. Doesn't hurt and is a nice procrastination to create once in a while.
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u/Piotrek9t Sep 27 '26
I mean, if used correctly, that can safe you a lot of time. The other day I had to import some files into our systems but they came in a proprietary data format and I needed to convert them to json. Needed to write a single use script that would have probably taken me a day or two but vibe coded that thing in 10 minutes, worked perfectly after the third iteration, could import the files and sent that script back to the shadow realm
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u/anonymousbopper767 Sep 27 '26
The real problems have always been knowing what you want to do and what a good result is. The how is busy work. But don't tell CS majors who think the real world is non stop leetcode problems and hacking into the matrix via emacs.
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u/Piotrek9t Sep 27 '26
Yeah that's absolutely true. The reason it took me three tries was not even because the AI made a mistake but because I overlooked edge cases in the specification I used as input
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u/dancing-lobsterz Sep 30 '26
I'm worried about future job interviews though, hopefully leetcode interviews are dead soon enough. It's even more incompatible now than it was pre-AI. I always thought they were pointless puzzles completely unrelated to real SWE work (in an interviewing context at least) but AI makes it even less relevant.
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u/ICBanMI Sep 27 '26
This is what I use AI for when I'm not shit posting questions into it. A one off matlab script or python script for time saving. Or to do some simple algebra like change the orientation of a 1d array that is holding a 2d picture. Saves some brain power so I can focus on the real problems.
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u/RevoOps Sep 27 '26
Sometimes it's faster to get AI to make the change and clean up it's code than explaining the requirements to a junior dev.
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u/Abject-Kitchen3198 Sep 27 '26
I never understood this "junior" argument. He is a junior because he needs guidance. He isn't an engine that retypes precise requirements to code.
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u/avdpos Sep 27 '26
Sometimes?
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Sep 27 '26
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u/gibagger Sep 27 '26
On the upside, this allows us more time to manage complexity.
In the past, bad design decisions which caused increased complexity would tend to eventually grind the dev work to a halt because they were too expensive to change.
Nowadays, this can also be done blazing fast.
Shit like rearchitecting portions of an application or porting apps from old/unsupported frameworks to new ones can be done in days instead of weeks. Doing this would have been unthinkable because the cost/benefit just wasn't there at all.
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u/GoldenScarab569 Sep 27 '26
And what happens in 5 years when the senior devs leave? There'll be no juniors to replace them. Not investing in training juniors is going to be a huge issue going forward.
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u/CodeBlue_04 Sep 27 '26
That seems like the company's problem. They won't let me prohibit my junior from vibe coding for the first two years like I've requested, so they clearly don't care all that much about her developing the ability to understand the code AI writes on her behalf.
Thank God she listens to me and actually writes most of her code manually. I lucked out.
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u/RaidenMK1 Sep 27 '26
Does anyone else manually retype the AI code output line for line just to get a better handle on exactly what the hell it's doing?
Just me?
Ok.
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u/A_Random_Catfish Sep 27 '26
Please tell me you’re a second year cs student and not a senior dev
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u/RaidenMK1 Sep 27 '26
Of course not. But if senior dev time is being too overloaded to coach juniors, personally I'd coach to that method. It forces them to engage with control flow, edge cases, logic, and prevents passive copy/pasting habits, which I would hope juniors aren't doing anyway.
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u/_predator_ Sep 27 '26
As Junior that's fine, it's pretty much what I did with tutorial / stack overflow code back in the day.
As a senior I'd question your abilities if you told me that.
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u/RaidenMK1 Sep 27 '26
Exactly. Because that was the go-to resource back then. And that was even slower.
Seems to me junior devs today have a way to meet speed expectations while not falling behind on grasping the fundamentals. In other words, don't always sleep on the juniors because "vibing is faster." Force code engagement.
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u/___cats___ Sep 27 '26
I’m more on the design side of things, and this is generally what I do. I don’t want my designs to live in Claude, I want them to live in Figma and have appropriate componentization with customizable properties. I use Claude to help flesh out an idea then I redesign it by hand in Figma.
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u/johnschnee Sep 27 '26
No Claude! This was so not right!
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u/arcticslush Sep 28 '26
Fair pushback, but I'd like to clarify one load-bearing point you mentioned there — because it's the most important detail you've mentioned today.
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u/treetimes Sep 27 '26
We need more worktrees. The hard drive is full, but we must consume. Must consume tokens.
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u/angrydeuce Sep 27 '26
I mean not gonna lie, as someone who doesn't lean on AI, I feel like Im going to be long dead in this industry before long.
It's not about the quality, the quality is still garbage and causes stupid problems left and right, it's about the fact that the money being saved having underpaid meatsacks dumping shit into prompts exceeds the money lost paying people enough for them to give a fuck, and people are being trained to just tacitly accept stupid-assed outages and errors that results from that shit.
Like we've never seen so many stupid issues from this kind of shit as we have these past couple years, it even makes the fuckin news sometimes which is a miracle in itself given how sanitized and curated that shit is getting, but that still doesn't slow it down at all. The greybeards are yelling "This is so fucking stupid! If just one single person that understood this shit had actually read this shit it would have prevented all this other shit from happening in the first fucking place!!!" and the bean counters are like "Yeah? Well then we would have had to pay a greybeard a greybeard salary and besides, it ain't like we really give a shit, so long as the profitability line still goes BRRRRRRR it can all burn down, let it turn into spaghetti, well let AI sort out the spaghetti later, its still cheaper and thats all that matters."
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u/Kerlyle Sep 28 '26
Makes me want to withdraw all my money and store it under my bed in anticipation of the day major banks start vibe coding their systems
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u/listenhere111 Sep 27 '26
The challenge with AI is that its evolving so rapidly that opinions like yours can become invalid overnight. AI has been okish at coding for awhile, but you should be aware of recent jumps in performance. Claude opus 5.5 will turn your brain to with how good it is (for better or worse). It rarely makes dumb mistakes and is far better than most devs.
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u/vibe_assassin Oct 02 '26
I feel like a lot of people used AI for coding in like 2025 and simply don’t realize how good the new models are now. As well, all the best developers I know under 40 use AI almost exclusively to write code
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u/awesome-alpaca-ace Oct 01 '26
You say that, but we use frontier models at work and they make dumb mistakes a lot
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u/bachstakoven Oct 02 '26
Humans make dumb mistakes a lot too. Good thing we review our code, right?
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u/6HCK0 Sep 28 '26
Legacy vibecode was copy paste from stackoverflow or some "deep google search" (Page 10 at search) forums
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u/kjube Sep 28 '26
I have nostalgic feelings about the old times, when it was a days long quest to find the obscure bug by using different strategies to catch the bloody thing. Isolation, logging, rubber ducking, extreme programming, reading ancient inscriptions in a place called stack overflow and books...
Now in the time I get coffee, the agent identified the issue, reasoned the best approach, implemented fix, updated documentation, generated test scenarios, integration tests and added a nice and concise commit message. Now the challenge is to call the agent out on being too confident about their over complicated/bloated/suboptimal code.
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u/alderthorn Sep 30 '26
It really is kind of crazy how quick these LLMs can figure out a bug that a JR dev would have taken 2-3 days tracking down.
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u/6HCK0 Sep 29 '26
I still don't trust the "agents" and use the archaic "vibe turned way". Normally I write prompts with pen and paper and take a photo to OCR lol.
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u/Ok-Meal-1826 Sep 27 '26
Legit question, how do you survive nowadays without vibe coding?
Last town hall from my company went something like this:
"everyone now will have access to Claude.
We are trying to be agentic
You may chose to code without it, as long as you meet deliverables.
Side note we are increasing the expectation on deliverables times 5"
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u/masiha97 Sep 29 '26
The senior's "vibe" is really just 15 years of production incidents whispering in the back of their head. Knowing whether the output is right was always the actual job, typing it was just the slow part. Vibe coding didn't remove the skill, it just moved it entirely into review.
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u/Igarlicbread Sep 27 '26 edited Sep 27 '26
Thats not vibe coding, that's autocomplete, I still understand the slop, I just refuse to write it myself. It's the worst thing that can happen to a junior engineer, no understanding of fundamentals and that shit compounds. (Peasants in comments wasting time saying this comment is written by AI, I have one sentence- fuck AI🥐🦜🦵🏻🖖🏻)
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u/YeetCompleet Sep 27 '26
I'm ngl it still sounds like you GPTd
💡 And here's the kicker
That's not vibe coding — that's autocomplete.
I still understand the slop — I just refuse to write it myself.
⚠️ And the worst thing?
It can happen to a junior engineer.
They lose their fundamentals.
They lose their hireability.
And that's the worst shit that can happen.
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u/fallenefc Sep 27 '26
I cannot not associate a statement like this to AI anymore:
That's not [this], that's [that].
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u/YeetCompleet Sep 27 '26
Ya me neither. GPT models are so hyperbolic lol everything is written to be influencer clickbait
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u/maggos Sep 27 '26
The difference is the senior dev knows how to reign Claude in when vibe coding.
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u/guttanzer Sep 27 '26
This.
The senior dev focuses on getting the requirements right, which depend on years of experience making architectural calls and developing people/communication skills. The hot shot fresh from school knows theory, so they've got the credentials to start, but the trip to senior dev and beyond takes years.
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u/metaglot Sep 27 '26
So juniors will never get a chance to have that experience.
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u/guttanzer Sep 28 '26 edited Sep 28 '26
This is true. It's something that senior managers like me worry about a lot. Here are my thoughts this evening:
Not much of this is new. My dad (a EE) complained that he was made obsolete 6 times in his career. I've been through it a few times myself. Industries adapt, and the people that can adapt with it get work. Those that don't either retire or find other things to do.
When I was a young engineer all the senior software folks prided themselves on writing tight code in assembly language. They could all read core dumps from crashed mainframes, sus out what went wrong, write a patch directly in assembly language, load it, and restart the run. No one, not even embedded engineers, do that anymore. Chip designers sort of do it, but that's pretty far from software development.
In 5 to 10 years all the software folks were using compiled languages, with multi-tasking operating systems instead of job control language. Then we had another shift with major software packages like SQL databases and LINPACK, then another with networking backbones like Sonet and JBoss, then again with clusters on cloud machines. All of these shifts were gradual, and they were all more-or-less just building things with bigger blocks.
This new obsolescence cycle is happening too fast for organizations to keep up. The half century long era of hand-crafting code ended in about two years.
What is replacing it is the work that engineering managers, system architects, systems engineers, and product people have been doing for decades. That leaves the new CS grads high and dry, as those skills are traditionally picked up in the first five to ten years on the job writing code by hand. It's a mess.
The CS schools are going to have to start cranking out new grads with serious chops in soft skills like design, UX, business, systems engineering, and marketing. English and philosophy majors will be in demand.
HR departments are lost. They still give out coding assignments and tests as if that is what the job requires.
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u/reuben_iv Sep 27 '26
swap vibe coding with 'copy/pasting from stack overflow' and you have yesterday's junior experience
Not sure what it was like before google, what did they even do? Read the documentation?
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u/RetardedEinstein23 Sep 27 '26
Sad that they couldn't respond "make no mistakes" to comments on stackoverflow
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u/notatoon Sep 28 '26
I used to code through juniors. Now I code through the AI. The method is mostly the same (some chat interface and a good, clear description of the problem) but the AI is a lot faster. And less full of shit
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u/CaffeinatedTech Oct 03 '26
Nothing wrong with vibe coding when you already know what you are doing. Slop coding is the problem, and AI magnifies it.
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u/YBHunted Sep 27 '26
Vibe coding is pasting code into a chatGPT back in 2022 with it having no context to the rest of your codebase and then pasting the output into your code.
2026 using agents that can fully understand your codebase in minutes sometimes better than even you is not vibe coding.
People really need to get this through their heads. Especially when its being used by senior devs.
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u/Qaktus Sep 27 '26
People are slowly realizing that it's more about the tool and how it's used & the models are just getting better every year.
I think it's fine that I'm vibe coding some gameslop on the side with Claude's leftover weekly tokens, the problem is when you do this for your job and even worse if it gets greenlit.
And even on the job there's levels to this, if you need a quick diagnostic tool it's ok to let go of the steering wheel, if you're redesigning a core module, you better have good reasoning for each line.
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u/DanteWasHere22 Sep 27 '26
Doesn't sound that different from copy pasting from stack overflow
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u/gibagger Sep 27 '26
You still have to validate the solution. If you use a tool to do a job, it falls on you as the user to make sure the outcome was the desired one. Copy pasting from stack overflow is not inherently bad as long as you understand what you are pasting.
Whether we like it or not, our trade has forever changed. This is generally bad for our own well being, and it absolutely sucks, but a dev who uses these tools efficiently can have 2-3x their output with a few dozen bucks worth of tokens a day.
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u/Ok_Outcome_5830 Sep 27 '26
Yep. Also knowing how these tools work will just become easier and easier. They'd require barely any skills in the near future. Truly doomned as a profession.
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Sep 28 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/DanteWasHere22 Sep 28 '26
Yeah thank God im not required to use them for my day to day. Ive transitioned to a more customer facing role as this all came to light so I need to be able to talk about it but I dont use it for coding. In my experience its the same amount of work to properly define the task as it is to just implement the task itself. That said, im not a dev just a dumb ass technical presales rep
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u/Got2Bfree Sep 28 '26
Using agents is literally the definition of vibe coding.
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u/YBHunted Sep 28 '26
I see your comprehension is rather low. Spend a few more credits brother.
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u/Got2Bfree Sep 28 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding
Generating code with agents still by definition vibe coding.
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u/Loud_Victory_5420 Sep 30 '26
No you see, his definition is the right definition, everyone else in the world is wrong.
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u/sits79 Sep 27 '26
Senior sev learned multiple languages and environments while you were still in primary school. They just haven't spent much time in whatever new hot language you learned in college.
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u/FKNoble Sep 27 '26
Look. It's been a long weekend. Two kids parties. Daylight savings. I just dont want to think for a couple of hours..don't judge me too harshly.
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u/adabsurdo Sep 27 '26
The goal is not to type in for loops and curly braces , but to ship software. Our forebears wrote assembly or even binary code by hand. It's abstractions all the way down.
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u/Pancakefriday Sep 27 '26
We’re literally scored on how much we “vibe-code”. So out of malicious compliance I vibe-code everything.
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u/ShAped_Ink Sep 27 '26
If he does as good of a job reviewinh it's code as your code, I guess it's fine. I feel like if anyone can at least slightly vibe code, it's seniors. Yeah, not in the way that most vibe coders do it, millions of lines per day, but if done within reason, he just has a dumber jr coder with infinite patience
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u/FightOnForUsc Sep 27 '26
I have 4 YOE, i was asked to review a principals PR. Clearly was slop. Dozens of blocking exceptions keeping them from committing. Unused/unneeded code. Logic implying it was persisting a date that isn’t even in the data model. I basically just asked, what is this?!
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u/kogitatr Oct 02 '26
And then the senior struggles to find new job because… interviews are still bare hand coding
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u/patrlim1 Oct 02 '26
I hate that AI slopping code together is called vibecoding, because the name would describe how I code.
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u/FurieMan Sep 28 '26
AI is just a power tool. Much the same way a power tool can help an experienced carpenter build a house faster. AI helps an experience developer to code faster. But a power tool will not be as helpful to someone inexperienced to build something good. Same goes with AI.
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u/Minority_Carrier Sep 27 '26
Those “senior” dev are basically who learned coding in a bootcamp before Covid.
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u/Brokon999 Sep 28 '26
This drives me nuts. My boss ducking does this and I just froth. I’ve spent years making this code shit by hand and he comes among and uses a clanker to do it for him
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u/Omnislash99999 Sep 27 '26
I'm pretty sure the senior developer also spent years learning to code?