A friend of mine recently attended an open forum panel about how engineering orgs can better support their engineers. The themes that came up were not surprising:
Sacrificing quality makes it hard to feel proud of the work. No acknowledgement of current velocity. If we sprint to deliver, the expectation becomes to keep sprinting, forever.
I've been hearing variations of this for a while now, but now I'm also hearing and agreeing with "AI doesn't always speed us up".
"AI did it for me"
Developers used to google things. You'd read a StackOverflow answer, or an article, or a GitHub issue. You did some research, verified it against your own context, and came to your own conclusion. Nobody said "Google did it for me" or "it was the top result so it must be true."
Now I'm starting to hear "AI did it for me."
That's either overhyping what happened, or it means the developer didn't come to their own conclusion. Both are bad. If someone on my team ever did say Google wrote their code because they copied a StackOverflow answer, I'd be worried about the same things I'm worried about now with AI: did you actually understand what you pasted?
Vibe coding has a ceiling
Vibe coding is fun. At first. For prototyping or low-stakes personal projects, it's useful. But when the stakes are real, every line of code has consequences.
On a personal project, I asked an AI agent to add a test to a specific file. The file was 500 lines before the request and 100 lines after. I asked why it deleted all the other content. It said it didn't. Then it said the file didn't exist before. I showed it the git history and it apologised, said it should have checked whether the file existed first. (Thank you git).
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