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

61 points NotAnOtter | 3 comments | 04 Jul 25 22:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.731s | source

My company is increasingly pushing prompt engineering as the single way we "should" be coding. The CEO & CTO are both obsessed with it and promote things like "delete entire unit test file & have claude generate a new one" rather than manually address test failures.

I'm a 'senior engineer' with ~5 years of industry experience and am considering moving on from this company because I don't want

1. Be pushed into a workflow that will cause my technical growth to stall or degrade 2. Be overseeing a bunch of AI-generated spaghetti 2-3 years from now

Feel free to address my specific situation but I'm interested in more general opinions.

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wrs ◴[05 Jul 25 00:07 UTC] No.44469056[source]▶
I know with only 5 years experience this may not be obvious, but this is only the first of many “revolutionary” technologies making everyone around you lose their minds that you’ll have to deal with in your career. Like every other such technology, I recommend that you engage with it, understand it, relate that experience to what your employer does, and be the voice of knowledgeable pragmatism about where to use it. In other words, be an engineer.

If that can’t be done where you are, or isn’t valued, you’re in the wrong place.

I’ve been through this with (including but not limited to) PCs, OOP, client-server, SOA, XML, NoSQL, blockchain, “big data”, and indeed, multiple definitions of “AI”. Turns out all but one of those were actually somewhat useful in the end, when applied properly, but they didn’t eliminate the industry. Just roll with it.

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1. edanm ◴[05 Jul 25 06:43 UTC] No.44470591[source]▶
> I know with only 5 years experience this may not be obvious, but this is only the first of many “revolutionary” technologies making everyone around you lose their minds that you’ll have to deal with in your career.

While this has some truth, the size of the current "revolution" makes all the others look tiny, especially in terms of how it affects a programmer's day job. Nor did most of those "revolutions" affect every field of programming at once, like this one does. The percent of programmers actually impacted by blockchain is probably in the low single-digits. The percent of programmers using some version of AI tooling 3 years into this is probably >50%, and the more impactful tools will be used more very soon is my gues.

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2. wrs ◴[05 Jul 25 16:21 UTC] No.44473748[source]▶
Were you around for the OOP craze? It definitely affected a lot of peoples’ day job. I mean, quite a few people use C++ and Java, no?

In my list I didn’t even mention the internet, the web, smartphones, and the cloud, all of which had a very broad effect on programming and programmers, and had similar top-down edicts from the C-suite, e.g., declaring you must be “all-in on cloud”. Turns out those things were indeed quite transformative, but now that the hype has dissipated somewhat, we’ve absorbed them into the toolkit and just proceed with the engineering.

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3. edanm ◴[05 Jul 25 16:57 UTC] No.44473988[source]▶
I've been programming professionally since around 2003. I'd say I caught the late-stages OOP craze (or maybe after-craze) though not really the origin or rise of OOP. My first job was in a C++ codebase, and I spent a lot of time learning the OOP design patterns (or really, the "how do we make C++ behave well" patterns).

That said, the rise of OOP is probably measured in a decade or two. It eventually "spawned" whole new programming languages, that eventually got a lot of popularity. But this is over a much longer time-frame than how quickly we went from no such thing as AI coding, to (now) coding agents. It also didn't affect the entire industry in the same way - hell, some people were still writing assembly in the 80s as the OOP craze was winding up. I don't have actual stats, but I imagine coding agents are far more ubiquitious across far more industries/languages/stacks, for more quickly.

> In my list I didn’t even mention the internet, the web, smartphones, and the cloud, all of which had a very broad effect on programming and programmers,

The internet (or maybe the web) I'd say was probably the more transformative thing. Cloud affected a lot of things too but not quite as much and didn't make quite as big a difference to the day-to-day work. I deployed things pre-cloud and post-cloud (though honestly mostly during the early-stage cloud), and there wasn't such a big difference.

Look, at the end of the day you can't just compare AI to other technologies blindly and say "well they were big hypes, this is the same". By actually looking at what it's doing and how it's affecting things, it's fairly clear it has a much bigger impact on the day-to-day work of programming, as opposed to anything else you mentioned.

I'm not saying this is the end of development, for all I know this will mean more developers! But I think software development will look fundamentally different in 5 years in a way that is far more widespread than in any other of these changes.