Ask HN: Worth leaving position over push to adopt vibe coding?

> 1. Be pushed into a workflow that will cause my technical growth to stall or degrade

Whether your growth stalls or degrades is up to you, but in my country your employer's ability to tell how you how to produce/deliver the work (not just the outcome desired) is the difference between being an employee and contractor

You should remain open to new things in this industry. Hate it or not, AI is currently the new thing in our line of work.

> 2. Be overseeing a bunch of AI-generated spaghetti 2-3 years from now

How you implement code, including human review and understanding of code, is key. I have never copy and pasted code into development from an LLM/AI helper. I've certainly asked it questions about the code, tested the code output, had it add comments to help me understand the code it wrote and produce alternate methods that better fit my needs, etc.

"No spaghetti" in the codebase will prevent having to take care of it, but that doesn't mean small modular components, troubleshooting, general ideation of different approaches to see what can scale, etc. isn't going to be really helpful.

> I'm a 'senior engineer' with ~5 years of industry experience and am considering moving on from this company

5 years is not what I would consider a big bargaining chip in today's market full of seasoned developers, including those who started when they were in middle school and are applying for the same jobs as you would be.

Can you work with your employer to effectively introduce some AI tools and workflows to help ideas, changes, revisions, new features, or even documentation?

Don't jump until it is safe, and remember the next place is likely just slower or one leadership away from asking their employees the same thing your employer is.

I'm open to new things. I've seen demo's, attended presentations, and spent a long time toying around with it myself. I have not been convinced there is any meat there, not in it's current iteration. LLM's are designed to make things that "look" like human output and thus are very good at hiding bugs. It's ok at getting the first 20% of the project done, but that was never the hard part. It's always been the last 20%, and modern LLM's simply cannot do it. Not on large scale projects.

New things have come and gone. So far the only thing I'm convinced of is, it's easier to get funding when you can claim you use AI. That's it.

> I have never copy and pasted code into development from an LLM/AI helper

Well that's simply a different reality from what my employer is encouraging. So not relevant. They not only want us to copy-and-paste, they want us to delete otherwise functional code to make it easier to paste in AI generated stuff.

Asking questions is fine, that's much much closer to an augmented search engine than prompt engineering. You're describing something different from what this post is about.

>5 years is not what I would consider a big bargaining chip

I'm not bragging. I'm giving context. If I was 0 yoe or 20 yoe, those would be relevant too. And for what it's worth, I also started in middle school.

>one leadership away from asking their employees the same thing your employer is

Yeah that's probably true