A “junior” project manager at my company vibe coded an entire full stack web app with one of those LLM IDEs. His background is industrial engineering and claims to have basically no programming experience.

It “works”, as in, it does what it’s meant to, but as you can guess, it relies on calls to LLM APIs where it really doesn’t have to, and has several critical security flaws, inconsistencies in project structure and convention, and uses deprecated library features.

He already pitched it to one of our largest clients, and they’re on board. They want to start testing at the end of the month.

He’s had one junior dev who’s been managing to keep things somewhat stable, but the poor dude really had his work cut out for him. I only recently joined the project because “it sounded cool”, so I’ve been trying to fix some flaws while adding new requested features.

I’ve never worked with the frameworks and libraries before, so it’s a good opportunity to upskill, but god damn I don’t know if I want my name on this project.

A similar thing is happening with my brother at a different company. An executive vibe coded a web application, but this thing absolutely did not work.

My brother basically had one night to get it into a working state. He somehow (ritalin) managed to do it. The next day they presented it to one of their major clients. They really want it.

These AI dev tools absolutely have a direct negative impact on developer productivity, but they also have an indirect impact where non-devs use them and pass their Eldritch abominations to the actual devs to fix, extend and maintain.

Two years ago, I was worried about AI taking dev jobs, but now it feels like, to me, we’ll need more human devs than ever in the long run.

Like, weren’t these things supposed to exponentially get better? Like, cool, gh copilot can fuck up my project files now.