alt Hacker NewsAs a developer, I kind of feel like this all smells like job security.
After using LLMs for a while, I have to admit it's pretty nice, and I like using it. I've been vibecoding a few apps, and it's a good dopamine hit to immediately see your ideas come to life. However, based on my experience, it will bite you if you trust it blindly. Even in my vibecoded projects, it keeps adding "features" without me asking for them. Since they're just pet projects, I don’t really care as long as the end result is what I'm expecting, but I don’t think companies will be as flexible. I also don't think customers would like it if features changed or got added with every new fix or update.
So this could go in a bunch of different directions from here, but to summarize the current situation:
A lot of companies are heading in this direction.
Without proper engineering, AI will easily write more code and potentially change the application unintentionally.
We will have fewer junior engineers entering the market because of fear around AI and reduced hiring.
AI usage will hit a critical point where it is making massive amounts of changes, and the people "prompting" it might start getting overwhelmed.
We will end up with more features that people have to keep in their heads. I don’t think we can trust LLMs 100%, and because of that, developers will still need to know exactly what the application does.
Eventually, there will be a lot of bugs, and developers will complain that we need additional human resources.
Hiring starts again.
Replies
>As a developer, I kind of feel like this all smells like job security.
Ditto, but as an infra guy, doubly so. People are making infrastructure decisions, they are writing config files, they are writing scripts and hacks and everything with AI. People are vibe networking entire ISPs. I saw one guy showing off how he had replaced his entire monitoring system with Claude. Its going to be good money for people with abstract problem solving skills. I cant imagine all the fun new problems people are vibing up for me right now.
> Eventually, there will be a lot of bugs, and developers will complain that we need additional human resources
I just hope I can last that long.
this is pretty much my conclusion. I try very hard to teach my interns the straight and narrow.
While I agree with the general sentiment that decentralized, bespoke solutions will explode, and require some maintenance (which may in-turn result in more hiring), I've seen plenty that still makes me hesitant to fully embrace this idea as likely. I know this is a wall of text, so forgive me while I doom-post my thoughts for a few minutes:
For one thing, the efficiency gains are massive. Bigger than any other tool, for any other price. Our company's main product is a web-app. We've been working on a re-write of our main product over the last few years. In one afternoon, I set up a new project with our desired stack, and was able to vibe-code an MVP of our product that we've been working on in a matter of hours. It wasn't perfect, of course, but I prompted feature after feature in bite-size prompts, each one taking between 5-10 minutes to complete. It looked pretty professional, and by any measure it was certainly "good enough." Given a little more time, I could solo ship and maintain what has taken us a few years to build as a small dev team. Unfortunately, this is more like a cheap "full team-replacement" rather than an efficiency-improving tool
Then there's the non-technical CEO AI hype-train. Our CEO (and the rest of our directors) have fully embraced the Claude suite of agentic tools. They're all regularly spinning up mockups, apps, and toolchains every single day. I can tell they're addicted to it, and they see the gains first-hand. In fact, while it hasn't happened yet, I wouldn't be surprised if the CEO laid off the majority of the dev team and vibe-coded the entire app himself (along with a few experienced devs). For now, they hold the view that "AI is a multiplier, not a replacer!" and in the same sentence will say "if this allows us to go the next few years without hiring again, that's a win!" I was asked point-blank why we couldn't just vibe-code our whole app. I didn't really have an answer. Yeah, there's the nice thoughts like "we wouldn't know how to maintain our app" -- but Claude would do a decent job in a single dev's hands, or "AI will potentially change the application unintentionally and introduce bugs" -- but proper observability, testing, and further prompting could fix those things in minutes to hours.
Frankly, it just doesn't make sense for companies to keep their whole dev team around anymore. No matter how many projects you launch and initiatives you tackle, the backlog will rapidly shrink, while individual dev capacity grows to exorbitant heights. Non-technical CEOs don't care about tech-debt, cognitive debt, poor software design practices, learning to code, keeping devs smart, the joy of problem solving, the art of a good algorithm or architecture; they care about shipping a product that works reasonably well, provides value, is worth paying for, and doing so for the cheapest investment possible. Unfortunately, AI fits THAT bill in nearly every single way.
I'm hoping you're right, and that the sheer volume of software being created now will increase demand. I'm worried, though, that it will never be enough to offset the massive capacity gains we get from AI.
There are a lot of similarities to the outsourcing boom a decade or two ago. Lots of small/cheap companies saw that they could hire an entire team of devs in another country for less than one US developer and jumped on it with high expectations but low process. Many of them didn't do anything to make it successful. They blindly hired the cheapest option they could find, gave them some vague requirements, and had very little ongoing technical review or oversight.
The process often went the way you're describing. Initial rapid success as prototypes got up and running quickly with the messiest code imaginable. But over time progress slowed more and more as tech debt and poor decisions created an increasingly large drag, eventually resulting in a stalled/dead project.
Maybe this time is different, but a lot of my early work was cleaning up projects that fit this pattern. I hope the new up and coming developers will get the same opportunity.