Development speed is not a bottleneck

You have the unbelievably productive programmers - we all know their names, we use the code they wrote every day. Then you have the programmers who want to be there and will try everything they can to be there - except gain depth of knowledge. They tend to be shallow programmers. If you give them a task and spell it out, they can knock out code for it at a really good pace and wow upper management. But they will always lack the ability to take a task not spelled out and complete it. Vibe-coding is like sugar and crack mixed together for these people.

The difference between Software Engineers (or Developers) vs Programmers; with the latter designation being a stretch for some.

It’s infecting expectations I’ve noticed as well. The thing LLM coding tools expose very plainly if someone wasn’t already aware is that management would rather ship with bugs or missing features - no matter how many - as long as the “happy path” works.

The vibe coders can deliver on happy path results pretty fast but I already have seen within 2 months it starts to fall apart quick and has to be extensively refactored which ends up ultimately taking more time than if it was done with quality in mind in the first place

And supposedly the free market makes companies “efficient and logical”

I think we should we put this title-based distinction to rest.

Whether you call yourself an engineer, developer, programmer, or even a coder is mostly a localized thing, not an evaluation of expertise.

We're confusing everyone when we pretend a title reflects how good we are at the craft, especially titles we already use to refer to ourselves without judgement. At least use script kiddie or something.

We’ve only had these tools for, less than 2 years?

I think those “fall apart in 2 months” kinds of projects will still keep happening, but some of us had that experience and are refining our use of the tools. So I think in the future we will see a broader spread of “percent generated code” and degrees of success

In my local world: Writing code to specification is programming. Writing the specification is engineering.

Can't agree more.

> If you give them a task and spell it out, they can knock out code for it at a really good pace and wow upper management.

This is so true. I sometimes spend entire days, weeks, all I do is provide those type of engineers the clarity to "unblock" them. Yet I always wonder, if I had just spent that time coding myself, I might have gotten more done.

But it's also this that I think bottlenecks development. The set of people who really know what needs to be done, at the level of detail that these developer will need to be told, or that coding agents will need to be told, is very small, and that's your bottleneck, you have like 1 or 2 devs on all project that knows what to do, and everyone else need a Standard Operating Procedure handed to them for every task. And now everyone is always just waiting on the same 2 devs to tell them what to do.