Technical growth in 2025 means understanding how to use LLMs effectively more than your peers.

There's no going back to pre-LLM days. Just like we're not going to stop using machines to weave textiles.

My workplace has execs saying similar things unfortunately. it's even in some company goals that we will be using it. pretty commonly known company too.

25 years of experience here. AI is the real deal, and it should be the primary way you’re coding now. Everyone who doesn’t embrace it is about to become a dinosaur overnight.

They’re going to pay you to learn to work with the thing you need to learn to work with anyway? Be smart. Take the deal.

That said, it’s a free country, you can quit any time for any reason.

Yep, your company is pretty much doomed.

CEO can afford being somewhat ignorant about the nature of engineering work or how llms work (still a red flag for a tech company).

But CTO being that stupid (if you don’t exaggerate) leaves little room for doubts.

If you are not at least using these tools, more so than vibecoding but understanding how to improve your craft, you are going to lose. I’m now 100% behind AI gen code as it has given me 10x powers. Ask the right prompts, get the best code. AI, if you reject it, yngmi

Zooming out the problem is micromanaging vs. let those on the shop floor make decisions. You are being told how to work. If everyone but you agrees maybe it is time to consider a move. Your story paints a worldview you have that will be loved by some companies I think.

If it is CTO only and the engineers all disagree. Maybe worth thinking about how to get that voice heard without ruffling feathers.

Try an evaporating cloud! This is a bit heavy to read but is a good technique to think about. It is so good it might change YOUR mind too about this situation! It looks to get to the facts and once practices is a good tool to use.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporating_cloud

Tldr is they want vibe coding because X and you want not vibe coding because of Y. The assumption is Y = !X but if it isn't there could be a good win win.

Truth is for most businesses tech is just a means to an end and not an end to itself.

> delete entire unit test file & have claude generate a new one

Why not just add new tests or refactor the existing ones? Seems kind of silly.

Aside from that:

  - if you don't like AI tools and can afford to do so, then look for a place that matches how you want to work
  - if you do like AI tools, or are open to learning them, then there isn't an issue (aside from maybe how they're used)

There isn't much more to it: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-artisans-and-brainrot (bit of a rant of mine on the topic, the tl;dr would be that the cat is out of the bag in regards to these tools and there are both positives and negatives, but they lead to brainrot and degradation of skills the same way how IDEs and StackOverflow did, just a large leap further)

Jeez, I was still calling myself junior after 5 years. Nice.

So there are companies where forcing vibe coding/LLM stuff is not a thing at all. This is majority of companies by the way. You can easily find one of them.

There isn't enough context to hazard a guess at stay or go.

I would like to call out deleting the unit tests as a very funny way to deal with code generators breaking the product.