“No Duh,” say senior developers everywhere.
The article explains that vibe code often is close, but not quite, functional, requiring developers to go in and find where the problems are - resulting in a net slowdown of development rather than productivity gains.
LLMs/“Vibe Coding” is probably a little bit more useful than the average intern with some tasks bumping up to an early career hire (what would historically be a Junior Engineer before title inflation/stagnation).
As in: it can generate code that might do what you want. But you need (actual) senior engineers to review the code thoroughly. And… how do people get the experience they need to do that?
Which basically results in turning everyone into a manager. Except your reports aren’t humans and you don’t get more pay. Instead your reports are vscode plugins. Which… sounds like absolute hell but I can get why the (wannabe) management class loves that.
Even that description is vastly overselling it’s usefulness. Every time someone says it’s like a junior dev I just sigh, because literally the only reason I like junior devs is because they turn into not junior devs. Never once has assigning something to a junior dev made my job easier. The entire goal is to train them to the point they make PRs that I don’t have to walk them through reworking.
Nowhere close to any junior ime. Grads learn very quickly. Interns only job is to understand. Code academy career switchers understand requirements and will ask questions. Subservient AI does fuck all of any of those things
They are more akin to yet another Rapid Application Development wave imo. Go see how the previous iterations have done. Lots are still with us (rails ftw!). I’ll bet most will outlive LLMs