What the hell is going on right now?
Engineers are burning out. Orgs expect their senior engineering staff to be able to review and contribute to “vibe-coded” features that don’t work. My personal observation is that the best engineers are highly enthusiastic about helping newer team members contribute and learn.
Instead of their comments being taken to heart, reflected on, and used as learning opportunities, hapless young coders are instead using feedback as simply the next prompt in their “AI” masterpiece. I personally have witnessed and heard first-hand accounts where it was incredibly obvious a junior engineer was (ab)using LLM tools.
In a recent company town-hall, I watched as a team of junior engineers demoed their latest work. I couldn’t tell you what exactly it did, or even what it was supposed to do - it didn’t seem like they themselves understood. However, at a large enough organization, it’s not about what you do, its about what people think you do. Championing their “success”, a senior manager goaded them into bragging about their use of “AI” tools to which they responded “This is four thousand lines of code written by Claude”. Applause all around.
I was asked to add a small improvement to an existing feature. After reviewing the code, I noticed a junior engineer was the most recent to work on that feature. As I always do, I reached out to let them know what I’d be doing and to see if they had any insight that would be useful to me. Armed with the Github commit URL, I asked for context around their recent change. I can’t know for sure, but I’d be willing to put money down that my exact question and the commit were fed directly into an LLM which was then copy and pasted back to me. I’m not sure why, but I felt violated. It felt wrong.
A friend recently confided in me that he’s been on a team of at least 5 others that have been involved in reviewing a heavily vibe-coded PR over the past month. A month. Reviewing slop produced by an LLM. What are the cost savings of paying ChatGPT $20 a month and then having a literal team of engineers try and review and merge the code?
Another friend commiserated the difficulty of trying to help an engineer contribute at work. “I review the code, ask for changes, and then they immediately hit me with another round of AI slop.”
Here’s the thing - we want to help. We want to build good things. Things that work well, that make people’s lives easier. We want to teach people how to do software engineering! Any engineer is standing entirely on the shoulders of their mentors and managers who’ve invested time and energy into them and their careers. But what good is that investment if it’s simply copy-pasted into the latest “model” that “is literally half a step from artificial general intelligence”? Should we instead focus our time and energy into training the models and eliminate the juniors altogether?
What a sad, dark world that would be.
Here’s an experiment for you: stop using “AI”. Try it for a day. For a week. For a month.
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