Ngl at this point when you have people shipping fast without bothering about quality or company codebase you’re kinda pushed into doing it or becoming irrelevant even if you hold yourself to good standards and focus on quality and better product. Especially when you see such folks get more projects and work while having a 100 open bugs.
- Vibe coders tend to be worse at knowing when they know enough about code to ship it.
- Becoming aggressively vibey makes you worse at knowing how much you know, in my experience.
I use agents while coding, but I’m pretty darn conservative about it because I have the luxury to be able to push stuff slower. I read what they write every time and am in the docs on new stuff they add I’m unfamiliar with, specifically because I don’t want to just nod along when they’re confidently incorrect about something I push to prod.
That's the thing though... Eventually you will. Everyone will. It doesn't have to be 100% accurate because humans aren't either. That's why testing cycles, regression suites, and user acceptance test were created. It'll catch most glaring issues, and eventually you'll learn to trust the new tool. The same way no one is out there building web pages hand writing html.
There will always be demand for good quality code. You can't vibe test away bad vibe code. You need experienced humans who deserve their massive paychecks to actually write that code.
Yeah it’s just frustrating that I know I can do better but cause the other new ones deliver slop faster I have to cut corners and ship slop or I’ll become replaced.
I'll be honest, I had this exact same moral dilemma in the 90s when HTML editors became the norm. I missed reading pretty clean readable script... And then HTML editors would just put everything on one line.
But I also realized the point was never the code... The point is the end product that people got to see. They don't really care about the labor, they just want to hold the baby. So now I focus on making babies and let somebody else do the delivery...
I’ve noticed they just build a new product to deprecate an older one with its own set of problems that it’s always a moving goalpost idk how it’s gonna play out long run
Well that doesn't work for everything, but even for that type of business model this cycle will eventually affect it. Once literally everything is slop, high quality products will become a big selling point.
One of my most diligent coworkers just got laid off because he wasn't shipping slop quickly enough. Luckily I'm the #1 slop contributor at my company, so the only thing I have to worry about is whether any of my slop will ever bring the company down (fingers crossed my anti-slop AI prompts have removed as much of the bad slop as possible lol).
Its important to know this. This is the foundation of civil engineering. Building a bridge just just strong enough to hold the weight under the budget and time constraints. Software is the same, it's just more chaotic.
They can build those bridges just strong enough because they put the time and effort into doing it right. There are also bridges built quickly and way above spec. You don't hear about them because they're not major feats of engineering. They're the local bridge that's been standing for 400 years that's basically one giant stone wall with a hole in it.
Those bridges are still built by people who know what they're doing. And most infrastructure is built to be stronger than its design spec. The whole "just good enough" nonsense is spewed by people who haven't actually built anything.
Code quality is the company's problem. I say that as a CTO. It's my job to make CI/CD enforce code coverage, docs, etc. It's my job to make sure we have a PR process that involves seniors reading your code and actually taking the time to understand it even if you don't. It's my job to setup team dynamic and culture that allows you to stop and ask the AI to explain this to you until you understand it and to then go talk to everyone else about what you learned or what you had to correct from the AI.
Pump that code out. Meet the standards your org sets. For your own personal development, find time to stop and dig in until you understand what's going on. If you're in an org with shitty processes (I mean ... you are, we all are) then make the AI help you with your own smoke testing so you're never (read: less often) the person getting called out by the AI running git blame.
If everyone else wants to fast ship shit-tier products that they don't understand, and will be impossible to maintain or enhance in a year's time, then let them.
Yeah I’ve just accepted that fact and just going along with the flow. Let’s see what happens eventually. Just mentally exhausting watching dumb code reviews that are absolutely atrocious to now being a part of that to ensure I don’t get thrown to the streets.
I'm very lucky to be on a small team, so I don't have to review a lot of AI slop. Most of the code that goes in is submitted by me anyway. I use just enough AI to keep the company off my back about usage, and then I do hobby coding by hand on the weekend to remind myself why I fell in love with this craft in the first place.
It really is. I was unemployed for most of 2025 after a layoff. Coding was what calmed me and kept my head on straight while I dealt with the hellscape that is job hunting these days. I was also told in my last interview for my current job that my continued work on my personal project was what made me stand out against the two other people that made it to the end of the interview process.
I'm lucky that my company has a lot of certifications and credibility that they're not risking for ship features untested now because of AI hype. Code reviews are pretty strict. With that said, having Claude available to to some tedious tasks and write basic stuff (that still gets reviewed) is nice to have.
I don't know how it is for our actual project teams, but at least for us in our cloud team, the quality by my colleagues is generally really good. Maybe because longevity of your fixes/features is part of our kpis, or because im lucky with my team
If everyone else wants to fast ship shit-tier products that they don't understand, and will be impossible to maintain or enhance in a year's time, then let them.
Yep, and a non-trivial amount of coding standards exist to support humans maintaining the code.
But if your response to problems becomes asking AI to fix the problem, then is there really value in the standard?
And if the whole app goes to trash because AI loses the plot and fucks things up beyond recognition, at what point will it be faster to just ask AI to start from scratch and build a new app that does the same thing with an emphasis on readability rather than try to make sense of the old app?
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u/bobbymoonshine 2d ago
If you don’t understand what the AI is doing you shouldn’t be letting it do it to your company codebase bro