We're all CTO now

Or scrape out all the dead grass that has piled up inside.

I have tested this. I have been coding for close to 20 years, in anything from web to embedded.

I got tired of hearing about vibe coding day in and day out, so I gave in, and I tried everything under the sun.

For the first few days, I started to see the hype. I was much faster at coding, I thought, I can just type this small prompt to the LLM and it will do what I wanted, much faster than I could have. It worked! I didn't bother looking at the code throughly, I was more vigilant the first day, and then less so. The code looks fine, so just click "accept".

At first I was amazed by how fast I was going, truly, but then I realized that I didn't know my own code. I didn't know what's happening when and why. I could churn lots of code quickly, but after the first prompt, the code was worth less than toilet paper.

I became unable to understand what I was doing, and as I read through the code very little of it made any sense to me, sure the individual lines were readable, functions made some semblance of sense, but there was no logic.

Code was just splattered throughout without any sense of where to put anything, global state was used religiously, and slowly it became impossible for me to understand my code. If there was a bug I didn't know where to look, I had to approach this as I would when joining a new company, except that in all my years, even looking through the worst human code I have ever seen, it was not as bad as the AI code.

> I think AI has already gotten to a point to where it can help skilled devs be more productive.

Not really. The nice thing about knowing when to do something is you can just turn off your brain when typing code of thinks about architecture in the meanwhile. Then you just run the linter for syntax mistakes and you're golden. Zero to no mental load.

And if you've been in the same job for years, you have mental landmarks all over the codebase, the internal documentation, and the documentation of the dependencies. Your brains runs much faster than your finger, so it's faster to figure out where the bug is and write the few lines of code that fixes it (or the single character replacement). The rest of the time is thinking about where similar issues may be and if you've not impacted something down the line (aka caring about quality).

I don’t agree. There’s a “muscle” you train every time you think about problems and solve them, and I say muscle because it also atrophies.

It's like when image generators came out and people looks surprised that some people actually enjoy spending hours with a pencil to draw something and have not immediately come in mass to push the "generate" button.

> bulkshitter

With all due respect, this perspective baffles me. Some see it your way, others see so much opportunity.

> but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job, regardless of if it applies to their day to day workloads

As others have mentioned this is the problem. Not being able to pull up a binary tree the most efficient way on the spot should not be the criteria to identify a good developer.

There’s a difference between not learning something, and not using something after learning it. For the latter the relearning process is fast. And often it may only requires a few hours of practices. There’s such thing as long term memory.

If you properly learn the skills, then refreshing your skills takes way less time than learning them the first time. This means you didn't really lose the skill.

>Sure someone won't fire you because you can't balance a binary tree by hand, but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job

People that do this need their behavior changed. Testing people on quickly find-able implementations is an absolute circus. Obviously an exception if the job actually involves writing CS algorithms, but most of them do not.

> Think of all the studying that is required before applying to tech jobs these days.

Surely you realize this is the problem. I just landed a mid 6-figures job _without_ grinding leetcode. They’re out there. This game everyone plays is an abomination.

Sounds rewarding, any particular resource you would recommend that you've enjoyed?

But they never atrophy to 0%. The body remembers. You're never restarting from scratch.

I have, and it does a mediocre to poor job, even at trivial tasks using popular stacks and languages. IME, one most either start with a green field, or babysit every step with/as an expert, or both. Perhaps I've just been unlucky or my projects have too much debt.

Exactly. Having built a few non-trivial projects with Claude Code, you can act as a CTO. At least that is one semi feasible way of using it.

I would say in a generation or two, you could operate in a way where you rarely have to dive into the code.