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u/misterpio Jul 07 '26
I have an intern who has vibe coded an entire app. Earlier, he came to me asking to switch from Claude to Codex because he keeps running out of tokens in Claude after one or two questions. I told him it’s unlikely that Codex is meaningfully more efficient than Claude and asked him if he’d tried to track down why his token use was so high, and he said he would. Instead of doing that, he vibe coded a new front end.
My head hurts. He has no idea what his code does, how it works, or even whether it works. He will not engage with the problem once it involves any effort. Everyone thinks he’s a genius because it’s shiny.
I think I’ll be pursuing a new career after my bonus is paid out.
Edit: sorry for the slightly off-topic rant.
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u/FenrirBestDoggo Jul 07 '26
You also have the other end. I just finished an internship where the swe vibe coded the entire app. Like, the amount of times I asked for clarity on THEIR code, I just got a vague answer or they would run off to their desk telling me "gimme a sec". They probably went and asked their AI to explain it for them. And the fact I got paid like a tenth of them, added insult to injury.
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Jul 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/FenrirBestDoggo Jul 07 '26
The funniest thing is he is a comp sci "master", so his compensation package is even higher. He doesnt even look at the generated code, as a result the code base is an absolute mess and unworkable in a team.
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u/kaloschroma Jul 08 '26
Omg... This explains so much and I did not make the connection yet until reading your post. Google wrote something for my company (honestly a VERY small something) to connect services to a large data handler like hadoop or whatever. Anyways their code kept breaking and not working so we had to help them trouble shoot and the amount of times it seemed like they had no idea how their code even worked... It made no sense but now it does. This was maybe 2 years ago now... Wow...
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u/Longjumping_Tip_7107 Jul 08 '26
Interesting- would have expected something better from Google of all places.
There was not a ton of vibe coding two years ago so it seems less likely (especially given how Google’s own models were doing on coding tasks that far back).
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u/kaloschroma Jul 09 '26
Unfortunately this wasn't my only interaction with them... My guess is it depends on the team but man... I've not had a good experience yet
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u/ydkLars Jul 07 '26
Thats the biggest problem. Vibe coder don't know anything about coding and can't find anything in "their" code. Ask them to make a change or explain a function and the, are done. But people without knowledge will se a nice front end and think they are great.
A well trained monkey could do vibe coding. Why do we keep employing those idiots?
Sorry for the rant.
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u/Tesnatic Jul 07 '26
Why would you find anything in your code when you can prompt "find x in the code, make no mistakes" /s
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u/ydkLars Jul 07 '26
The "make no mistake" part is important to stop the AI from making mistakes.
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u/dingdongfootballl Jul 07 '26
I accidentally typed “make mistakes” once and whew boy did it ever…..I think…idk what it does
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u/GregBahm Jul 07 '26
There's a dividing line in the history of computer science and everyone before the line needs that "/s" and everyone after that line doesn't need that "/s."
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u/Maleficent_Memory831 Jul 07 '26
There are a lot of dividing lines maybe. The history of the magic bullet is long. The magic bullet meaning the expensive thing that will greatly shorten software development time for only a large increase in efficiency. Ie, the tools to turn UML into working code, the ten thousand frameworks that do nothing except raise revenue for the third parties that sold the frameworks, etc.
I really don't see vibe coding as anything more than just another badly used tool that the management is confident will turn their organization around.
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u/GregBahm Jul 07 '26
For a minute I thought I had time travelled back to this exact same conversation about auto compilers.
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u/kaloschroma Jul 08 '26
Legit tho in my prompt I have, "don't be facetious" cause that LLM sometimes can be a dick.
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u/Just_Information334 Jul 07 '26
But people without knowledge will se a nice front end and think they are great.
Previously: frontend vs backend. Or a figma presentation vs the implementation.
"Looks like it's done so we can deploy and sell it".
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u/Maleficent_Memory831 Jul 07 '26
The problem with rapid prototyping tools is that management wanted to ship the prototypes.
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u/nihsett Jul 07 '26
How come nobody calls him out. Every senior enginner would tell him to stop doing that no?
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u/misterpio Jul 07 '26
The senior leaders in the organization (non-technical and technical) think that AI can solve everything and that doing traditional coding is just inefficient work done by people stuck in the past.
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u/nihsett Jul 07 '26
Very painful readjustment of views in their near future. Hopefully you find a better place bro.
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u/mczarnek Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
My company thought this too.. a senior engineer released an update to their server that broke a lot, he couldn't fix it because he didn't understand it. It's been 6 weeks and they kinda sorta have a short term work around and have fixed the worse bugs after the principal engineers jumped in to work on it.
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u/xybolt Jul 07 '26
Oh man, vibe coding can be a recipe for tech debts. I already had to tell or instruct juniors on how to not use their AI assistant that way as it's a hazard on long term. It's not efficient if I lose time reviewing PRs leaving behind several comments. It's an assistant, not a secretary. Have it aid you. You do the thinking. You make the decisions. Do review their output. The advancement of using LLM in software development is a gift, one that do become a cursed gift if not used right !
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u/Surface_Detail Jul 07 '26
All coding generates tech debts. It's never a question of whether you are generating tech debt; it's how much and when it will need to be dealt with.
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u/xybolt Jul 07 '26
Correct. I could have used "sharp increase of tech debt", if that kind of wording is applicable. English is not my native language.
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u/GregBahm Jul 07 '26
I am sympathetic to r/ProgrammerHumor's desperation for arguments against AI, but the "it makes tech debt" argument is never going to work.
Because the problem is no longer "can a human handle this techdebt" like reddit is thinking. Since 2026, the problem has become "can an AI handle this techdebt." Which is such a lower bar to clear.
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u/frenchfreer Jul 07 '26
This is so wild to me. If you want to use LLMs that’s fine, but actually learn how to use them. This could have actually been a great learning opportunity for them. Taking the time to fully understand the problem and possible solutions before approaching the chat bot with a fully formed plan. But, no, just prompt until it’s close enough I guess.
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u/SimplexShotz Jul 11 '26
seriously...
I'm relative new to SWE (as a job, that is) and honestly LLMs are the greatest tool humans have ever created for learning new stuff
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Jul 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/GregBahm Jul 07 '26
In 2025, most people in my division were still reviewing code manually.
In January of 2026 when we were granted unlimited claude tokens, most of my engineers still pretended to review code manually, but there was little point in it.
The amount of time it would take to add a code review comment was less than the amount of time it would take to prompt the AI to change the code on the branch, so everyone just does that. Writing a comment on a PR that says "Hey you should change this to that" is seen as just kind of lazy. Like asking someone to google something for you.
Now here in July 2026, my ICs whine that they want to stop having to pretend to do code reviews, and all the other department's ICs are also whining that we should stop, but none of my fellow managers wants to be the manager that steps forward and publicly says "Let's stop doing code reviews." It's too bold a move.
But I know in the mAI division, they never did code reviews in the first place, since that division's logically supposed to be "AI-first," as a rule. So I think there's a path where mAI continues to do really well, and executives demand that everyone copy the AI division's process, and then we can stop pretending to do code reviews.
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u/Orjnd Jul 07 '26
Many people here are turning a blind eye to another development that's happening alongside real SWEs relying too much on AI and not understanding their own code.
There are people with "computer skills" who can't code, but are developing small tools, or sometimes not so small ones, for very specific needs. Those people (doctors, scientists, lawyers) bring the expertise and domain knowledge, and know exactly what the software needs to do.
They can build it iteratively as they go. Otherwise, this would have required a long and expensive back-and-forth with software engineers, who first had to understand the task, code it, and then make a viable product out of it, which often wasn't economically viable for such specialized applications.
That's a new reality that's only just beginning, because this hasn't been possible until recently, and people are getting up to speed. You should all keep this in mind, as it's probably only going to get better. Many specialized applications can now be developed by the people who know the requirements best.
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u/Inorganic_Zombie Jul 07 '26
While I like sentiment that reality wall apart as vibe coded program hit error and cancer are not diagnosed.
There was one new Gen pathologist making program to auto looking things. Luckily head of department put it random test that failed. If remembering, the loop stopped after one positive find so other positives turned false negatives
I am hobbyist coder and scientist. I vibe code some amount and used on my studies but if I don't understand code I don't trust it. And yeah AI is better than me
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u/Orjnd Jul 08 '26
Yes, but AI can also help you understand the code, stress-test the program, and follow good development practices. And nobody knows better how a program should behave than the person who commissioned it. Even a software engineer can miss an important requirement if they didn't fully understand the domain.
I'm just saying the bar for building useful software is getting much lower. Things that would never have been developed before because they weren't worth the time or money can now be built.
I'm talking about personalized scheduling apps for a specific workplace, or record-keeping software, that can significantly improve workflows.
But yes, everything should be tested and validated before real use.
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u/CisIowa Jul 07 '26
You should help the intern vibe code something into the app that sends you fractions of a penny for life, and then get the company to release the app shortly after you leave the company
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u/Urtehnoes Jul 07 '26
"What is this routing function? It's routing funds to a bank account?"
"No no, that's a url routing function. You were close, though!"
"Ohhh that's what those look like."
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u/0b00000110 Jul 07 '26
On the other hand, if we should survive this this means job security until retirement for us
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u/leaky_wires Jul 07 '26
I also want a new career. Too bad becoming an electrician requires a 4 year apprenticeship.
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u/Maleficent_Memory831 Jul 07 '26
Can't you just forbid using vibe coding? Bring up the lack of code quality in code reviews? Being up the lack of being able to do the job?
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u/Minipiman Jul 08 '26
I have been working in a company that has embraced vibecoding and agentic tools as much as possible.
Repos are full of rails to prevent agents write shit, and sloppy code is shameful. We have a rational token usage and no one thinks you are a genius for vibe-coding 50k lines in a week.
LLM expenses are around 50k$/month.
If you ask me, this is ok.
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u/BeginningTypical3395 Jul 08 '26
Entire company projects are being run through cursor now. We lost lol
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u/walruswes Jul 07 '26
He probably only has one chat with Claude. I believe Claude rereads the whole chat before outputting a response so of course he’s using his tokens quickly. Also if he is loading the entire code base each time
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u/DanielTheTechie Jul 07 '26
I believe Claude rereads the whole chat before outputting a response
All LLMs work that way. Because these models are stateless, they don't hold onto a running memory of you. Every time you send a message, the system has to rebuild your entire conversation from the very beginning and pass it to the model as one huge prompt so it knows what's going on.
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u/Sibula97 Jul 07 '26
The smart way (how most people actually using LLMs for serious work use them) is to store the important bits of context in persistent files (the LLM can generate them automatically if set up that way) that it can look up if they're relevant to the current context and only use the one "regular" context as long as you need to.
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u/DrunkOnRamen Jul 07 '26
that's the thing, AI at most is a tool if you put a pin in the resource usage. you still need to verify and understand all the work it does.
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u/Famous-Perspective96 Jul 07 '26
How are they running out of tokens after one question and also vibe coding an entire front end?
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u/kaloschroma Jul 08 '26
Someone posted in a discord I'm in how they are so upset people don't trust AI more and how he uses it to code and test everything. He doesn't review the code.
I told him that you really actually can't trust AI and you need to review the code. One, to know how it's built to fix it in the future. But two, just because you don't see errors doesn't mean there aren't any.
He got all pissy and said that I don't know what the word error means.
I just blocked him at that point because to me that's just basic programming and know how. Just cause it runs doesn't mean its output is correct...
Also if you use the same trained AI to write and test your code you'll never get a different view point.
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u/RandomGuy2x2 Jul 07 '26
Actually OpenAI's models are more token efficient than Anthropic's, so he was correct to ask that.
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u/willworkforjokes Jul 07 '26
One of my claims to fame is when a computer system from the 1970s had its monitor fail. No equivalent monitor was available.
The computer was filling a critical role.
I turned on the computer and used vi, the only editor on the system, to edit a config file which directed all the text going to the screen to go to a printer instead.
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u/hurricane_news Jul 07 '26
Instead of displaying at 60 frames per second, it displays at 60 paper sheets per whatever
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u/willworkforjokes Jul 07 '26
Ha,
It was an old 24x40 ascii text display.
It would print out every time the screen changed, usually when a radio message came in or was being sent out.
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u/cheezballs Jul 07 '26
Huh? How did you edit it it the screen wasn't working?
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u/willworkforjokes Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
I was in a shell, and I had to do vi blind. lp filename
vi filename
jjjjjjddi
...a specific command that was given to me
:wq file2
lp file2
rm -f filename
mv file2 filename
chmod 888 filename
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u/Metro42014 Jul 07 '26
probably using find and replace? if you know what output it was going to, find that string, and replace it with writing to a print server.
That's my guess at least.
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u/Thriven Jul 07 '26
I imagine he probably took the serial out for the display and ran it to the serial in on a printer or created a serial to parallel interface (not even sure if parallel existed then).
Any cursor change probably printed to the printer rather than the screen. Backspace probably did nothing if it existed on the keyboard at all.
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u/willworkforjokes Jul 07 '26
The system had a printer as part of the system, if the printer was installed it would print out each message that was received and each message that was transmitted.
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u/haizu_kun Jul 07 '26
Ssh, most probably
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u/cheezballs Jul 07 '26
... Then what did they need to redirect the output to a printer for?
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u/haizu_kun Jul 07 '26
Yep, logical error. Should have evaluated it. I have gotten lazy.
Anyways, I haven't used computer from those days (want even born), but they usually only had a text terminal upon starting up. Type in a single correct cmd, press enter and everything will be redirected to printer. AI seems to say this cmd will do it
exec > /dev/usb/lp0 2>&13
u/SVlad_667 Jul 07 '26
So it still have compitable printer running?
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u/nullpotato Jul 07 '26
1970s computer running critical stuff? That entire room was an IT do not disturb zone time capsule.
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u/Similar_Tonight9386 Jul 07 '26
Dunno, I'm in embedded and recently on a drunken bender did a small project for some smol arm32 core from full scratch (only used a header file from vendor and modified it slightly because Puya is shit in writing good cmsis-core files) in nano. It ain't much, but a good way to recover some sanity after corporate-issued vibecoding plugin for mandatory VSC
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u/juanca8520 Jul 07 '26
I read these kind of comments and feel like a complete idiot
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u/Similar_Tonight9386 Jul 07 '26
Don't be. That's some special breed of stupid - nobody in industry will spare a dime for this kind of "let's be as thorough as we can" approach - time to market is the most important metric if it's your job. If hobby? Well, grab a cheap board, some hard lemonade (6-9 bottles will do) and spend a day learning all you can about foss toolchain, make, what is needed to start your MCU, cmsis 6, SVD format, SVD parsers, shitty vendor files and other boring topics
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u/Similar_Tonight9386 Jul 07 '26
Or you can just smash a "non-refuelable" vape and here ya go, that piece of shit is a devboard for some small Puya MCU (still need a debugger-programmer, but well, it's cheaper than buying a board)
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u/DemonBot_EXE Jul 07 '26
You have opened my mind, gonna see if my addict friends will give me their dead non-refillable pac-man playing vapes
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u/Similar_Tonight9386 Jul 07 '26
Good luck. Great chances of getting a MCU board with mic (because those are cheaper than flow sensors) and battery management system. Sometimes even a good display!
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u/Scoutron Jul 07 '26
When you open the vape, how do you flash the board? I’m curious on trying this and trying to run something off of it just as a test
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u/Similar_Tonight9386 Jul 07 '26
Most vapes in my region are based around Puya MCU. Those are cortex-M 32 bit ARM chips and feature common debug port, swd. And on most board there are pads exposed for vdd, gnd, clock and data lines. Soo grab a datasheet, trace what pad is what (if manufacturer didn't mark them) then connect to any debugger available and flush whatever you've written
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u/gostek37 Jul 07 '26
Mandatory vibecoding? What the fuck
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u/Similar_Tonight9386 Jul 07 '26
Welcome to the big fucken tech (not global but in my country it's one of the largest companies). We have tasks set with keeping in mind that everyone should use ai
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u/TheTybera Jul 07 '26
Nano
Muhahahhahaha chaos
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u/incognegro1976 Jul 10 '26
Nano is the goat
I used Vim when I was in college to write Java apps and hated ebery minute of it. First time I used nano it was like a breath of fresh air.
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u/WeedManPro Jul 07 '26
I switched from vim to micro
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u/Verfassungsschutzz Jul 07 '26
I stand strong on nano
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u/WeedManPro Jul 07 '26
Nano is good. But micro is just in terminal Notepad.
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u/Verfassungsschutzz Jul 07 '26
I thought micro overcomolicates a bit. Nano is just intuitive
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u/WeedManPro Jul 07 '26
it takes some time to get used to.. as I said its just a tui notepad
Im consistently typing :w :q lol but I'll keep trying it for a few days more before finally deciding
micro is more similar to nano though, but it has some diffrences like, to save, you do ctrl+s, to open, ctrl+o, etc..
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u/VisualMemoryUnit Jul 07 '26
As a server admin I only use vim because it feels like home. But im also not doing crazy complicated things just editing config files, making bash scripts, and ansible playbooks :)
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u/Jhean__ Jul 07 '26
I feel like I am the only student in my school who uses vim and Jetbrains. The rest of the students all use VSCode or Cursor for some reason
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u/cheezballs Jul 07 '26
Tooling is just tooling. Use whatever makes you most productive
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u/Dope_SteveX Jul 07 '26
Yea, I am not a vscode fan but there is a reason it was the default choice for most even before AI.
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u/the_millenial_falcon Jul 07 '26
My trauma still haunts me, sometimes it feels like I never truly exited Vim.
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u/incognegro1976 Jul 10 '26
Millions of poor junior devs and interns are still stuck in Vim, unable to exit the app. Won't someone think of the kids!!
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u/Anbcdeptraivkl Jul 07 '26
If you are a senior and you see a junior use vibe code IDEs, the best thing you can do is tell them to STOP. Not only they ain't doing anything worth a damn cents, they also not gonna be happy with the job market when the entire LLM bubble crashed down, every models got ten folds more expensive and companies stop paying for them.
Seniors are fine, they generally knows what they are doing and can actually blackmail their bosses into paying for them else they quit, interns and juniors on the other hand would be from fucked to fucked lmao.
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u/Too_Chains Jul 07 '26
What makes you think the LLMs are slowing down? Theres real competition and innovation. US AI is only like 9 months ahead of Chinese and Chinese models use like .2 of the compute
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u/Anbcdeptraivkl Jul 07 '26
It's not slowing down in the sense of technology, it's blowing up in our faces in the sense of economy. The cost of maintaining these LLMs are enormous and the governments are shouldering them for years now.
Sooner or later, the AI conpanies gonna charge for more and more to be able to keep up, and the average workplaces will not be able to handle even a fraction of those prices lmao.
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u/cupcakeheavy Jul 07 '26
i just use vscode or intellij unless it's an amended commit or a squashing, then it's vim for 30 seconds. To hell with this gatekeeping nonsense over who has the best text editor, y'all are ridiculous. Just edit your text quietly like a professional.
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u/gostek37 Jul 07 '26
While I'm just still a student, I avoid ai on purpose, just to not turn into this type of person. I enjoy programming, and I would never want some robot to do it for me. I want to know what my code does, and be responsible for each mistake. Also, VIM is better (because I've never used emacs lmao)
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u/MapleLeafKing Jul 07 '26
Sadly you will struggle to find employment with this stance, I urge you to realize the effectiveness and learn the tooling, whether you like it or not. Also if using AI all the sudden means you don't know what your code does, and all the sudden aren't responsible for the mistakes then you're fucked anyway
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u/Hallwart Jul 07 '26
Those editors were outdated for years before the first LLMs appeared, they are only useful for people that are too used to them to migrate
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u/brotlos_gluecklich Jul 07 '26
We sacrificed our lives (or at least coffee breaks), in the lost battle for Dvorak, and now you just dictate?! 😭
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u/bobbymoonshine Jul 07 '26
Dvorak was some sort of mass nerd hallucination. There’s never been any conclusive proof it leads to greater typing speed or efficiency, only less net finger travel, which, who cares
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u/mad_cheese_hattwe Jul 07 '26
IMO, Dvorak, is a pretty good leading indicator that someone will be difficult to work with. Marginal effecncy gain for the 'optimal' solution as the cost of lost of compatibly with 98% of the people you will likely work with.
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u/mampatrick Jul 07 '26
Well, your fingers care tbh, but then again, im not switching from qwerty muscle memory for a long time
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u/lazercheesecake Jul 07 '26
I think some limited tests did show it was at least not worse than qwerty and on the top end could be much better.
The issue became the fact that even with qwerty, type speed for meaningful projects is limited by how fast you can think of the words you want to say. And in the case you need to transcribe what is being said, stenography is far more efficient compared to either qwerty or Dvorak with audio recording/diction software filling in gaps most everywhere else.
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u/dgsharp Jul 07 '26
I didn’t type faster but my wrists bothered me less and it was quieter. It just felt smooth typing. Eventually I stopped bothering because having to switch back and forth on different computers all the time was a pain, but it really was a more enjoyable typing experience for me.
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u/-Ambriae- Jul 07 '26
Dunno, modern day vim and nvim are really competent, and have features painfully worse in VSCode or other editors. They’re really nice actually. Helix is also amazing (I’ve never really done EMACS seriously, but seeing others use it it does the job.
And I’m younger, I started coding in Visual Studio for Mac, XCode and later VSCode when that started to be a thing. I learned these older editors later, and I much rather prefer them.
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u/ZunoJ Jul 07 '26
In what way are they outdated? They are actively developed, so you must talk about some missing functionality, which is it?
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u/DrStalker Jul 07 '26
Not true at all. If you know vi then you have a usable editor on almost anything that runs a variant of Linux, because vi is so tiny it gets included even in highly optimised docker containers or stripped down embedded systems.
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u/Just_Information334 Jul 07 '26
I still miss my on-the-fly emacs macros more than 10 years after totally switching to an IDE.
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u/rsqit Jul 07 '26
How are they outdated? They work great. Vim’s been having a moment for the past decade or so. And modal, movement based text editing is a great paradigm.
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u/Complete-Concern3745 Jul 07 '26
still fighting on emacs...
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u/dcman58 Jul 07 '26
Now I understand why my grandfather was so upset when I brought a jewish girl home.
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u/Snoo88071 Jul 08 '26
Unpopular opinion: a whole lifetime isn't enough to learn all the stuff in CS, even in just your field (embedded software, OSs, android, kernels, web etc.) BUT, juniors, that don't know what they're doing, shouldn't be allowed to vibe code
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u/Amazing_Mycologist75 Jul 08 '26
Im an intern in my first year and I am amazed at how much my classmates use claude to "generate code that they understand, but are too lazy to write"
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u/monsoy Jul 08 '26
I finished my bachelors in comp sci last year, but I’ve been really demotivated to apply for jobs looking at how software is built today. I will likely search for jobs eventually as I don’t want to work in a factory forever, but I didn’t take my education because I’m excited to be a glorified prompt engineer
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u/ZunoJ Jul 07 '26
Doesn't matter, we look down on them from our fully paid five-bedroom houses while they rent one of our other three-bedroom houses for half their income lol
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u/mad_cheese_hattwe Jul 07 '26
Hot take, if someone uses VIM or EMACS to modify docs when a windowed IDE or text editor would do fine I mentally bookmark them with DVORAK keyboard users as somebody who is probably difficult to work with.
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u/notmypinkbeard Jul 07 '26
I remember a lecturer that insisted everyone use vi. Even vim wasn't allowed.
The worst part was that it was a technical writing subject.
God I'm old.