I’m a software developer in Germany and work for a small company.

I’ve always liked the job, but I’m getting annoyed recently about the ideas for certain people…

My boss (who has some level of dev experience) uses “vibe coding” (as far as I know, this means less human review and letting an LLM produce huge code changes in very short time) as a positive word like “We could probably vibe-code this feature easily”.

Someone from management (also with some software development experience) makes internal workshops about how to use some self-built open-code thing with “memory” and advanced thinking strategies + planning + whatever that is connected to many MCP servers, a vector DB, has “skills”, a higher token limit, etc. Surprisingly, the people visiting the workshops (also many developers, but not only) usually end up being convinced by it and that it improved their efficiency a lot and writing that they will use it and that it changed their perspective.

Our internal slack channels contain more and more AI-written posts, which makes me think: Thank you for throwing this wall of text on me and n other people. Now, n people need to extract the relevant information, so you are able to “save time” not writing the text yourself. Nice!!!

I see Microsoft announcing that 30% of code is written by AI which is advertisement in my opinion and an attempt to pressure companies to subscribe to OpenAI. Now, my company seems to not even target that, but target the 100%???

To be clear: I see some potential for AI in software development. Auto-completions, location a bug in a code base, writing prototypes, etc. “Copilot” is actually a good word, because it describes the person next to the pilot. I don’t think, the technology is ready for what they are attempting (being the pilot). I saw the studies questioning how much the benefit of AI actually is.

For sure, one could say “You are just a developer fearing to lose their job / lose what they like to do” and maybe, that’s partially true… AI has brought a lot of change. But I also don’t want to deal with a code base that was mainly written by non-humans in case the non-humans fail to fix the problem…

My current strategy is “I use AI how and when ->I<- think that it’s useful”, but I’m not sure how much longer that will work…

Similar experiences here? What do you suggest? (And no, I’m currently not planning to leave. Not bad enough yet…).

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    91·
    7 hours ago

    Honestly, this is what I would do in your situation:

    1. Update your resume and start responding to LinkedIn messages and possibly looking at least possibly.
    2. Take those workshops for LLMs, there might be useful stuff to learn there, auto-completion, code search and examples of how to use certain features are very good uses of LLMs.
    3. Don’t be overly vocal about it, but point at issues when you see them, e.g. those large messages that you’re expected to read point out how they’re way longer than need to be and how using LLMs to give you a summary said the wrong thing (even better if you have an actual example of this, by for example invoking TLDR bot or something similar on those messages every time they come up)
    4. Look at code that was vibe coded in areas you’re working and start creating tickets for the stuff you see, unless they’re vetting everything the LLM produces (which would be slower than writing it yourself) there will be issues there, start documenting those. The thing most managers and other “AI enthusiasts” don’t get is that LLMs are trained with stack overflow and thousands of random GitHub projects written by inexperienced devs for every one good piece of code, so they have thousands of bad or incomplete examples for every good one. This means they end up not doing things like verifying you’re logged in to use an API, sanitize SQL queries, etc. Because when you ask how to do something in stack overflow you will get an answer that is not meant to be used literally things like `query = f"SELECT * FROM {table_name}"`` is an okayish example on how to build queries with validated data, but it’s a TERRIBLE example to use with user provided data, but the LLM doesn’t know that, it just copy pastes the code that gets things from a table where it needs it.
    5. Prepare yourself, using LLM to write code has a short lifespan in most companies, but the damage takes twice as long to clean up. If you stay you will be seen as the naysayer and might even get fired for it, but eventually this will blow up so gigantically that they’ll start to regulate or even ban LLMs. And then there will be lots of garbage to clean up. In your shoes I might look elsewhere while possible as I wouldn’t want to be associated with the company that had all of their data leaked or similar, because if they’re using vibe code in prod it’s a matter of when.