> Skip the vibe coding, just let AI be a helper.

This I think will explain the differences in experience in industry. As pressures increase, control and power moves away from developers who have historically had a pretty strong position to dictate how they work.

Not everyone is going to be able to use AI as just a tool. The reality I have seen is that AI has sped the time-to-pr up for those who don't care what they ship, so that gets baked into estimates and expectations.

Eventually those working carefully with AI will be like the carpenter still using hand tools while the shop is operating CNC machines. The business can't afford the craftsmanship, no matter how right the craftsman is to point out that their work is better.

This is why I love AI as an enabler for myself personally, but still think it's going to ruin the experience of being in the industry.

> In all sincerity, what do you mean by wholly unpleasant?

“Wholly” was too strong a word now that I think about it.

But I’ll give two main things I find unpleasant.

One: Normally I like working with other people. There is nothing more satisfying than collaborating on a complex problem with smart and conscientious colleagues. However, the bad experiences are now amplified:

- a random colleague gets sent down a wild gooose chase of an LLM claiming there is an issue with something I wrote. It’s a full blown hallucination because it found a confluence page which mentioned me and just decided to connect things together.

- another colleague is suddenly empowered with being able to vibe code websites and is now copying and pasting my replies into an LLM and pasting the LLM back at me over Slack.

- a colleague gives a quick drive by vibe coded PR to add a feature into something I own. It reimplements the same business logic that is already done elsewhere. It takes me more energy to explain all this than just do it myself.

There are dozens more examples. In isolation I can shrug each of these off, but it’s draining. Large organisations have become more “agile” with local optimisations and missing the bigger picture.

Two: while I agree that everything is getting done faster and I do get satisfaction out of that, I’m a deep in the weeds technical person. I don’t have it in me to be a big picture person or a people leader. I love having to think about algorithms, data structures, schemas, etc. While I can use AI has a pair programmer, it’s doing a lot of the thinking for me and it’s usually faster. So yes it makes me a better engineer, no I don’t enjoy not thinking as much. I don’t enjoy shifting solely to a higher level of abstraction. Maybe that makes me a bad engineer, but I cannot change how I feel about it.

AI as helper is basically a better google search, which is not much different than what we did before AI (copy paste from stack overflow)

the people I know who hate AI have a bizarre and unrelatable love for the pure math aspect of software engineering - the elegant software architecture, the efficient programming languages. the people who only care about getting stuff done are loving AI but people who spent their life learning how to properly craft high quality software are weeping - as they should be - now they know how kasparov felt

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