Vibe coding has turned senior devs into 'AI babysitters'
73 comments
·September 14, 2025cedilla
Funny how the article starts with someone using AI — to develop more AI stuff.
This reminds me of web3, where almost all projects were just web3 infrastructure or services, to the point that the purpose of most start-ups was completely inscrutable to outsiders.
I'm having lots more hope for AI though.
cs702
Here's the approach I've seen so far at a few startups:
1. Replace junior developers with AI, reducing costs today.
2. Wish and hope that senior developers never retire in the future.
3. ?
kermatt
3. Hire more developers to decode / devibe code, paying double in the end.
Analemma_
Sure, but by that time you've IPO'd and dumped the bag on the public, founders and seed-round investors make bank and are long gone by then.
I'm only half-joking: personally I'll be looking very closely at the IPO prospectus of any company founded in/after 2024 or so, to know how much vibe coding risk I can expect in its long-term prospects.
anonymousiam
1. Replace junior developers with AI, reducing costs today.
2. ?
3. Profit!
Spivak
I don't think this behavior has anything to do with AI although it seems like it's been used as an excuse to justify it. Everyone seems to be in a belt-tightening risk averse mode right now and that means cutting junior positions and leaning on smaller teams of senior staff. You can see this behavior in more than just tech and more than just positions that can be replaced by AI. The job boards betray it as well, job postings for junior staff have dried up.
micromacrofoot
you'll be retired by 3, good luck kids
matthewfcarlson
As someone who spends his non work hours convincing a half baked quasi person to not do dumb things (a two year old), I have zero interest in convincing a half baked quasi person to not do dumb things during work hours (most coding agents).
I’ve had good results with Claude, it just takes too long. I also don’t think I can context switch fast enough to do something else while it’s churning away.
bodhi_mind
I think it’s allowed me to spend more time being an architect and thinking about processes, problem solving. To put it another way, I’m still a developer, possibly to a higher degree (because I can spend more time doing it), and less of a coder.
samgranieri
As an experienced dev who’s gotten his feet wet a little with AI, I feel like , and does anyone else feel this way, that I spend more time telling AI what to do than it would spend actually writing this all out myself?
turtletontine
You may have seen headlines about this paper, which found that while most devs (apparently) feel like AI makes them 20% faster, they’re actually 20% SLOWER with it: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
askonomm
Yup, entirely gave up on AI as a result, and it didn't help that reviewing and fixing AI code made me incredibly bored to the point that if this somehow becomes the new norm of development, I'll have to find a new career, because I want to actually build things, not manage AI.
neilv
How do the colleagues of people "vibe-coding" feel about that?
Does it end up like having colleagues who are aren't doing or understanding or learning from their own work, and are working like they offshored their job to an overnight team of juniors, and then just try to patch up the poor quality, before doing a pull request and calling their sprint done?
Or is it more like competent mechanical grunt work (e.g., "make a customer contact app with a Web form with these fields, which adds a row to the database"), that was always grunt work, and it's pretty hard to mess up, and nothing that normally the person you assigned it to would understand further anyway by doing it themself?
jennyholzer
> Does it end up like having colleagues who are aren't doing or understanding or learning from their own work, and are working like they offshored their job to an overnight team of juniors, and then just try to patch up the poor quality, before doing a pull request and calling their sprint done?
yes
siliconc0w
Vibe Coding is so early 2025, I only check in context, prompt instructions, and seed values to deterministically generate the machine-code.
fzzzy
LLMs aren’t deterministic even with a seed.
jsheard
Doesn't that depend on the implementation? There's a trade-off between performance and determinism for sure, but if determinism is what you want then it should be possible.
jb1991
If you fix random seeds, disable dropout, and configure deterministic kernels, you can get reproducible outputs locally. But you still have to control for GPU non-determinism, parallelism, and even library version differences. Some frameworks (like PyTorch) have flags (torch.use_deterministic_algorithms(True)) to enforce this.
worble
Yes, that's the joke
geor9e
what if you set top_p=1, temperature=0, and always run it on the same local hardware
daemonologist
Maybe if you run it on CPU. (Maybe on GPU if all batching is disabled, but I wouldn't bet on it.)
mkarrmann
Horace He at Thinking Machines just dropped an awesome article describing exactly this: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...
TL;DR: assuming you've squashed all regular non-determinism (itself a tall ask), you either need to ensure you always batch requests deterministically, or ensure all kernels are "batch invariant" (which is absolutely not common practice to do).
jb1991
This. I’m still amazed how many people don’t understand how this technology actually works. Even those you would think would have a vested interest in understanding it.
sl8s
If you add an AGENTS.md, the AI agent will work more efficiently, and there will be far fewer problems like the ones you’re facing. You can include sections such as Security, coding style guidelines, writing unit tests, etc.
dwheeler
Using AI assistants != Vibe Coding.
AI can be a helpful assistant but they are nowhere near ready for letting loose when the results matter.
stavros
Exactly this, if you're babysitting the AI, you are, by definition, _not_ vibe coding. Vibe coding means not reading the resulting code, and accepting that things will break down completely in four or five iterations.
DeepYogurt
Brother most of them ain't even assisting. Management just forces it.
null
INTPenis
We're training our own replacement.
I've sort of gotten on the bandwagon. I initially used AI auto complete at my previous job and liked it a lot as a better intellisense, but wouldn't have used it to write PRs -- for one I tried it a couple times and it just wasn't good enough.
My new job pushes cursor somewhat heavily and I gave it a try, it works pretty well for me although it's definitely not something I would rely on. I like being able to ask it to do something and let it go off and come back to it in a while to see how it did. For me, I think it makes it easier to start on changes by coming into something (that might be wrong and bad), but for me personally having something in a PR to start from is a nice mental hack.
If it did well enough on the initial attempt I'll try to stick with it to polish it up, but if it failed terribly I'll just write it by hand. Even when it fails it's nice to see what it did as a jumping off point. I do wish it were a bit less prone to "lying" (yada yada anthromorphization it's just tokens etc.,) though, sometimes I'll ask it to do something in a particular way (e.g., add foo to bar and make sure you X, Y, and Z) and it'll conclude (rightfully or not) that it can't do X, but then go on anyway and claim that it did X.
I wish it were easier to manage context switching in cursor though, as it is juggling IDE windows between git repo clones is a pain (this is true for everything though, so not unique to cursor). I wish I could just keep things running on a git branch and come back to them without having to manage a bunch of different clones and windows etc.,. I think this is more of a pain point with cursor since in theory it would allow you to parallelize more tasks but the tooling isn't really there.
edit: the starting point for this is probably worktrees, I remember reading about these a while ago and should probably check them out (heh) but it only solves the problem of having a bunch of clones sitting around, I'd still need to manage N windows.