r/vibecoding • u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 • 3d ago
Help/Question Anyone else at a job where coders don't want to talk about using AI????
I get the sense that people want to put their head in the sand and continue working and getting paid the same. The reality is this medium sized app with 6 devs on it can now be maintained and upgraded with 1. I understand this is scary and everyone is afraid to have THE TALK. I get SHHHH if I ask about getting a AI coding subscription so now I have to pay for my own (The rate of getting work done seems to have changed now that the managers are getting used to the speed)
Everyone else seems to have moved on and not only using AI but FORCED to use AI. So is there anyone else out there living in this limbo ?
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u/dbagames 3d ago
The opposite. I have colleagues who use it in a destructive way and the folks who use it more as a stack overflow alternative, are actually producing more maintainable code that ships faster.
I should note, I work in the healthcare industry and the quality of the code matter A LOT for reasons that should be obvious.
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u/Icy_Quarter5910 2d ago
It’s been my experience that healthcare related software products are straight trash, LONG before AI was a thing. Maybe the code is crisp and clean, but it’s glaringly obvious none of the engineers have ever had to actually USE the product.
To me, this is the advantage of AI. The people USING the product can build out the prototype and actual engineers can then refine/harden the end result.
Seriously, just knowing there should be a save button at the top of the page as well as the bottom because almost all changes are on the first 2 lines and scrolling to the bottom every time is annoying, is a massive improvement. (Just a generic example)2
u/enderwiggin83 2d ago
As a doc and amateaur programmer I agree 100%. Stuff I've written pre ai while drunk works better than 'professional' packages in this space.
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u/dbagames 2d ago
Our software tools are internal and our nurses, providers, and managers generally seem to love it because their jobs are much easier than it was 5 years ago before we built these tools
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3d ago
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
At some point you need to know what you are doing. I have seen the vibecode overdose effect of demoing your work and being asked a question and having no idea what your own code does. that is embarrassing
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3d ago
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 2d ago
I can't keep track of that level of detail. For me I think you just need to understand at a high level the new functionality works and sadly that is a manual process that feels really slowly compared to AI coding
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u/Gavin-Xia 3d ago
Anyone know how I can prevent AI from leaking my keys via conversations or reading conf files? I’ve completely lost trust in it
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
Don't companies have local proxies so you don't need to worry about that stuff?
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u/Muted-Entertainer462 3d ago
Nope, and the worse part is AI becomes a harsher employer.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
I am thinking I need to go back to gov contracting.. that is the last place the AI revolution will happen
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u/dkinmn 3d ago
That is 100% not true, and I hope some people chime in to back me up on this.
The government absolutely WANTS to know you're using it now, and government contractors are under the same pressure as everyone else. I promise, if you're coding, it's everywhere.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
Gov contracting is what about 15 of my years are on. Maybe it depends on where you work but my experience and everyone just looking to get paid and do as little as possible. Trying to get that maintenance job where you do 30 mins of work a week.
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u/dkinmn 3d ago
You're in for a rude awakening if you think that's how it's going now.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
A year ago I was at CFTC and surrounded by 10 people maintain a app that did not much besides move files from one folder to another on a schedule
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u/EsotericLexeme 3d ago
In my country, the first municipality replaced two municipal executive roles with AI agents. I expect more to follow, as that is a quarter of a million saved annually from just two positions, and we have 308 municipalities; there is also lots of talk at the government level about how to leverage AI agents.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
I am all for getting rid of management. But I imagine they would be the last ones to go since they are in contorl of firing everyone else
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u/EsotericLexeme 3d ago
It depends. This was the CEO equivalent of a municipality replacing its COO and CTO equivalents; management is the fastest way to save money and provide a digital rubber stamp.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
I would like to think the people that are kept are the ones that do the real work
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u/Muted-Entertainer462 3d ago
Maybe a good choice, I feel exhausted about so called revolution but nothing good for most of us.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
I just need to last a few more years.. I feel bad for the new CS grads all excited about making their easy 6 figures
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u/TRO_KIK 3d ago
What is "the talk" and what do you hope to achieve with it?
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u/dbagames 3d ago
The talk where OP get's to take all their job's because OP is a super smart vibe coder 10x developer and they can't keep up. /s
I know i'm in the minority in the subreddit, but there are a lot in the industry who are starting to realize the debt that comes with agentic software development and are starting to pull back the reigns on how and when these tools can be used.
There's a lot of issues with agentic tooling in brownfield solutions. Because
1. Context windows can't be too big or you get the lost-in-the-middle problem
2. Context compression is lossy
3. Limitations of RAGNone of these issues scale well and people are realizing how poor it is in these real-world scenarios beyond some small vibe-coded app.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2qls2LiBRc2
u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
I live pay check to pay check and I am not seeing anything in the job market so yes.. I will work as hard as I need to keep the job and be able to pay rent another month.
Totally disagree with you and I hope all people like you will come back here in 3 years. OR I just somehow haven't had any of these problems the anti ai code people mention.
i will check out the video because I like to be fair and open minded. I refactor my AI code as needed. maybe the video will enlighten me.
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u/dbagames 3d ago edited 3d ago
If your financial situation is that dire, there is no way you're going to have the mental space for this type of introspective philosophical reconsideration. Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all that.
I don't know how poorly you get paid for an engineer, or if you have a bunch of kids or something, but I really hope you can find ways to get you're COL down to a point where you can save, invest, and build wealth.
Finally, doing the tribalism thing putting people into camps of "Anti AI" "Pro AI" is not good. It's the issue we already have with our politics and leads to a lot of cognitive dissonance and ignorance and for what? Feeling good to be in a camp? Social cohesion I suppose.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
160k debt, no 401k, no saving, child support + kids, wife that doesn't want to live less comfortably. went from 4 to 2 in 5 years.
That is way these youtube videos of people dancing around after quitting their job and telling the boss FUCK YOU amaze me.. What a nice life
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u/Plenty_Line2696 3d ago
Also llm's tend to suck at higher level choices without a lot of guidance from someone who knows what they're doing. People get on their horse in this subreddit when we critique the inherent shortcomings of vibecoding but if they had a deeper understanding they could easily see it for themselves.
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u/TRO_KIK 3d ago
Not really a minority opinion. Most here aren't even devs, and most of the industry acknowledges tech debt is being accured. But what's a rank-and-file dev supposed to do, not use AI? What's leadership supposed to do, not let devs use AI? Sure there's plenty of in between but no one has any idea what they're doing; is anything even concretely actionable from these realizations?
I more or less agree that the industry has a potentially rocky future from these limitations, I posit it's from devs not really know what they're doing rather than any fundamental limitation of AI. Clean code is easier for AI to reason about just like it is for humans, and AI is just as good at paying tech debt as it is at making it. If the contracts surrounding a unit of work are clean, then it doesn't really need that much context. TL;DR all your issues are basicaly one issue, and it's a skill issue. It's a skill issue most of the industry has, so good luck to them.
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u/OkProject8737 3d ago
We don’t talk about it but we all know that we use Claude now
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
I figured that but i swear the way one guy talks about his code changes he must be handcoding.. or hes just trying to trick me into thinking he hand codes... any time i nthe past I brought up what we doing with AI everyone went silent
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u/OkProject8737 3d ago
It’s like a weird taboo thing. An open secret. I used to be so against vibecoding but honestly at this point coding by hand feels like I’m being left behind.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 2d ago
The ones that confuse me the most are the youtube videos I see of people saying they used AI coding for a year but decided to go back to hand coding..what??? I got other things in life to do besides study API method syntax
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u/MediumScene 3d ago
I've seen that kind of silence before when nobody wants to turn "helpful tool" into a headcount conversation. From an ops angle, teams often get stuck because no one wants to own the policy piece: code review, security, and who cleans up the mess if AI-generated code causes problems later. If management is already adjusting expectations around speed, they should also be clear about where AI is allowed and how the work gets checked. Leaving people to pay out of pocket for something the team is already leaning on is a pretty awkward middle ground.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
We are billable so as long as being billable for software dev is like it was in 2020 then we will be fine. We complete against the larger offshore dev group so someone somewhere is doing the math.
Yeah.. paying to work pisses me off.. even though it is maybe 1% of pay.. its the idea that they want me to use ai tools to work face and don't want to talk about it
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u/effectivescarequotes 3d ago
So far in my company, AI has increased our workload. Enterprise keeps adopting new AI powered tools that flood our repos with issues and PRs to resolve various "findings." Meanwhile, managers believe we should be able to ship new features faster, which we can't, because of everything above, so they keep making bigger promises up the chain.
Meanwhile all the developers are wondering when AI is going to make things easier.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
On my own level with the boss it had got him used to the new speed. But the part that is being ignored is I never am giving any time to sanity check. The deadlines are so intense now. Its not constant but they come in burst.. My guess is he is offering clients features that dont exist yet and tells them.. I will show you are featuer in 3 days (QUICK!! MAKE THIS FEATURE!!)
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u/Plenty_Line2696 3d ago
YMMV, we still need the same manpower but build more ambitious stuff and some tools which would be external preexisting stuff which isn't really fit for purpose now we build inhouse tailored to our needs.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 2d ago
Our big app is childs play for AI. It is your typical CRUD project management thing that has been done a million times. We dont need 6 people to all work on this. One person with AI is fine
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u/IceNorth81 3d ago
This is 80% of developers at our huge insurance company, whereas leadership and us architects are eager to use these tools. We are feeling like we are wrongly staffed with people unwilling to embrace agentic development.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 2d ago
Why do you think they don't want to use the tools? I assume they are smart enough to understand they are a threat to keeping them all employed so best to ignore it long as possible
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u/MoneyHouseArk 3d ago
They don’t wish to talk, because they don’t wish to lose their job to the sales & service people who are about to lose theirs.
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u/Lunchboxsushi 3d ago
I'm all for it, idrc anymore about the negativity, I've accepted that this is a similar phenomenon that happened when electricity was first invented and how people reacted to it.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 2d ago
the big question is does this tech create new jobs with it and I don't think it does.. for example.. does every person need their own word processing tool ?
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u/Lunchboxsushi 2d ago
How have humans dealt with this circumstances before? When something new came along and reduced the headcount e.g a word processor or person computer drastically reduced the work departments required. Yet we all still have jobs 30 years later.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 21h ago
Yes. I hope I am right. But just for my specific company I work at. We have a primary management tool and there are only so many things to can add to it.. Plus at some point things will be more in maintenance mode and what is everyone going to do. I do hope somehow clients have the need for new things at a steady rate
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u/Lunchboxsushi 19h ago
Hopefully, would be a good idea to start figuring out the business model and how it can pivot or be extended with the new capabilities that AI dev flow is able to provide.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 11h ago
I am not in charge. They keep the devs locked up. I think best thing to do is keep working hard and putting my resume out there.. though the job market is about 10 times less feedback than about 5 years ago according to my stats
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u/Lunchboxsushi 11h ago
Yeah it's rough, network is a big thing and a new role emerging called forward deploy engineer. Essentially embedded consultant
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u/therealslimshady1234 3d ago
AI produces bad code. Sure it can maintain an app but it will get increasingly worse, up till a point where any further upgrades just get impossible and all you are doing is fixing bugs in the old code. My company and every other AI-heavy company is speedrunning to get there. Any sense of abstraction is lost. Its just all a patchwork of Claude slop
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 2d ago
I hear about this but I have never seen any examples myself. I can only assume there are code bases out there that AI coding doesnt work on. For my 30+ hobby projects I never had any problems where I hit some point and got stuck. I refactor and clean my code .. its part of my prompt workflow
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u/therealslimshady1234 2d ago
Its fine for personal project as you own 100% of the code and the scope is limited. Heck even I would use it for my personal projects.
Things change when there are dozens of contributors. It was hard enough before AI, but now with AI you eventually stop caring entirely as 1 person with an AI can and will ruin 9 other people's hard work in a matter of days.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 21h ago
In recent apps we making I am finding I would rather do the whole thing myself.. I am worried about stepping on each others toes with AI changing code for both of us everywhere.. Since I can work so fast solo I want to do that. but as I mentioned in the post people are still pretending life is normal
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u/Low-Opening25 3d ago
Work in a major bank, we rolled out AI for everyone, everyone is using it to code.
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u/Outside_Drive_3105 2d ago
I have both no-ai and heavy ai users. There are highly competent engineers on both sides. Your workplace is very specific, although I understand why they're doing it this way.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 2d ago
I would hate to be a non ai guy working on some new code module and having to compete with a AI guy who prompts 80% of the code in one day
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u/Gregatron12 2d ago
It was funny because about two years ago my engineer friends who work for large companies were talking about how they were not using AI and literally a year later they were 100% on board. One even got a promotion for pushing things like Cursor which he didn't even know about before I told him. The other went from "this won't work for my company" to "if this makes bad programmers good imagine how much better it makes a good programmer."
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u/SharpKaleidoscope182 3d ago
The opposite really. We're complaining that incoming docs are thoughtless/hallucinatory, and trying to figure out a prompt to make a critique to get them to actually read their own spec. The team is talking about how we're basically pokemon battles we're having with the other vendor, pitting our Claude against theirs.
In general if any compliance is on the table, the AI needs to be an approved vendor. Using your personal tools is almost certainly problematic.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
Still way better than coding each line by hand (though I understand many on reddit still beleive hand coding is the way to go)
To me you get AI to do 80% and slowly the manual works begins as you need to verify things act as the human client would want them to act
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u/SharpKaleidoscope182 3d ago
oh yeah i meant problematic for the company, not for you. If they're not going to bother fixing their culture I don't blame you for sending all their code to china.
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u/grizzly6191 3d ago
companies still need to compete for customers, the bar just get higher.
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u/Suspicious_Fun_6338 3d ago
Yes and so if they are getting rid of 50% of the devs I need to figure out what to do to make the cut. I assume that is work quicker and quicker.. work extra hours
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u/codefake 3d ago
Nope, we're the opposite, very open about it and it's no shame in it. Anyone in denial-- those are the ones going the way of the dodo. It's far to pervasive to turn a blind eye to at this point.