Posted by NotAnOtter 1 day ago
Ask HN: Worth leaving position over push to adopt vibe coding?
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.
AI is being adopted mainly where it works, and where it works is where regurgitated code cobbed-together from what has been seen before is sufficient to get the job done.
Assume that your CEO and CTO are not complete idiots; that they have some rational argument for believing that the approach will work. It's also possible they are gambling on an experiment; if it fails, they will back off on it.
If you want to avoid being told to use AI, you have to work on legacy tech stacks that AI doesn't understand; algorithmically complex code; critical infrastructure code where one bad bit stops multiple machines and applications; safety-critical embedded where AI slop could maim and kill and so is out of the question, etc.
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)
> 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
I didn't think you were bragging, and I hope I didn't come across as trying to put you in your place.
I'm responding with market context. The market is upended right now with no end in sight. Also, most employers if not meaningfully all, will or are involving AI. Many, if not most, people applying for decent positions right now have 3x the experience and are very willing to do whatever.
Don't let your principles end you up sleeping in your car.
> LLM's are designed to make things that "look" like human output and thus are very good at hiding bugs.
This can be true, definitely was more often true in the past. But there is a time and a place for human expression, and probably isn't in code. Your human expression is likely helped by tools. I doubt you're writing in Notepad, but your IDE doesn't get thrown out the window because it can't fully replace you or write code for you.
IF you are being blindly told to copy/paste from an LLM, then use that as part of your ideation and work from there, using AI tools as much as you can in ways that work. Become a leader in this new frontier by delving in (just kidding, that's meta about another article trending on AI)
> 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.
Your post needs more detail if you want people to reply to your exact situation, but I think you can make clear arguments against doing this, then do this for 3 weeks, followed by the obvious: backtracking.
Leaders are by nature often encouraged to try new things. Standing in their way won't help you, but you can warn them, do it, then help them get back on track. By being a team member in this way, you are not in charge, but you can build trust equity if these leaders stick around and have techy ideas in future. In my experience, I usually outlast bad leadership (and their associated ideas). You have to be correct and not act like you're the boss to survive it, though!
I am in a situation where ai was mandated, I was skeptical, but took it as a chance to try it out. I now can’t imagine going back.
Hiring people who haven’t used it will be a marketable skill too
Which companies can you point to with openings on their careers page that specifically mention "no AI" or don't mention AI as part of the toolchain/expectations?
Can you explain your thinking on this?
Obviously there will be jobs where AI isn't required, so omission of experience would be fine, but I can't think of any reason why it would be marketable to advertise "I've never worked with AI".
In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a resume that contains anything along the lines of "I haven't used X". You would just omit the lack of experience. Otherwise it risks signaling other negatives (not comfortable with change, etc.).
So it's like I've never used a gun. Which isn't really a strong point. At the very least, even if you don't plan to use guns, you'd know how guns work and where they don't.
No one is saying "I've never used a gun" or "I've never pirated a movie" on their resume to market their morals. Resumes are to market the skills you have that match the job you're applying for, not for marketing your moral stance.
But I doubt those people put "never used Flash" on their general resume (or literally any other resume except the one tailored to that position, if they even put it on the resume instead of their cover letter). I also doubt they thought of it as a "marketable skill" considering it was applicable to ~1 job.
In any case, this seems like an incredibly niche situation that probably has no business being extrapolated to all AI tools.
If you do get another offer remember that there's always a risk when you change jobs. I.E. how stable is that companies funding? Will they want to do layoffs, too? Are their investors pressuring them to make cuts? Because if you're a new hire you can say good bye to that job. We don't have formal tenure in tech but there's still a human cost to firing people who have been long-time with a company. The decision makers have less attachment to a new hire so its easier to fire them in that respect (and how many decisions with fires are just arbitrary, number-based, bad luck.)
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's always pointless fads and food fights. Just tough it out. (Until a better gig comes along.)
I wish I could advise my young self "this too shall pass". The savvy play is to be a "team player". All those dumb hills I choose to die on... For dumb crap which eventually self-mooted all by themselves.
There was a comment (or a story?) some time back about how to survive as a software developer when projects are managed by Pointy Haired Bosses (PHBs). From memory:
Always be positive, optimistic.
Never say no or hedge or doubt.
Proactively manage upwards with enthusiastic status reports.
Instead of owning up to failures (due to fantasy estimates, ridiculous deadlines, scope creep, misc chaos, etc), list in detail all the great things and awesome progress you and your fantastic team have miraculously accomplished.
Like "reproducible builds which reduced failures by 1000% FTW, saving 30 hours per week" and "implemented boss' recommended pub/sub heptagonal meta architecture event sourced distributed pseudo sharded hybrid cloud something something, attaining sustained P95 latency of sub 3 picoseconds for 2 days"
Sadly, I was never able to keep up the act for more than 12 months. I'm just too contrarian, sarcastic, jaded. (I used to tell myself that I was "results oriented". I now see I was just an asshole. Everyone lies, needs to suspend disbelief, have a reason to crawl out of bed every morning. Who am I to piddle in their Cheerios?)
I'd like to think that if someone had clubbed young(est) me with the clue stick, I could have adapted.
YMMV. Happy Hunting.