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Ask HN: My boss wants us to vibe code and I feel in danger
5 points by throwaway37262 5 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
I am using a throwaway account because my boss scared the hell out of me.

I work for a large AI team (think one of the big ones... Won't say which). And our CEO gave a short but quite clear talk: you HAVE to vibecode. He will check how much we vibe code, how many PRs etc, and will act accordingly.

Now. I work in the infra team. What this vibe code mandate means for me is that my work will become unsustainable. I will forecast hordes of PRs impossible to review in time, bloated to the roof. And I can't push them back for the fear of being reported to the CEO. On the other hand, I'll be measured based on the stability of the infra, which will of course collapse.

While I see more and more people, even smart people I admire(d), like Karpathy or Antirez, talk wonder about AI coding in a way that looks way, way too similar to how people endorsed Theranos, I face the daily reality that AI coding doesn't work for me. It's wonderful to kickstart a project I don't want to do. But taking home a big architecture refactor or an improvement in the infra... That's not what AI excels at, to say the least.

AI is great at throwaway code. AI is great at things you don't know how to do. But for infrastructure... In general, for things that OTHER PEOPLE RELY ON and that NEED TO BE MAINTAINED... it's going to end very badly.

But I am losing focus, sorry. What is crazy is that I can't publicly speak about this because I'd get fired. Can you believe it? I am easily the best engineer at the company. Literally EVERYONE thanked me for the contribution to the infrastructure. And still, I am afraid of losing my job because I can't say: AI can't do this.

And given the shitton of stocks I have and cannot sell, I must hope that this obvious hype will continue long enough to pay for my mortgage.

A new Theranos is in the making.





Could you work on something automated that ticks the box but avoids your concern? Like an vibe coding scan tool ?

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Cool that you bet your ability to pay your mortgage on something that is only good for the simplest throwaway code and things that can’t be relied on or maintained by others.

Doesn’t seem like the vibecoding mandate is the problem?

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Just in case, keep your CV updated.

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I hate to tell you this - but you are completely wrong and you need to learn how to use modern tools to do your job.

Source: Professional software developer (or adjacent) for 30 years and I’ve worked in cloud architecture for 8 years working with both cloud architecture and software developer - at a startup, then working at AWS directly and now a staff consultant at a third party firm.

I don’t “vibe code”. I keep my hands on the wheel and treat AI as a junior developer.

I know AWS (and before that on prem architecture). For infrastructure as code, I j know CloudFormation and have use it for 8 years.

I had a project that wanted to use the CDK. I gave ChatGPT the contract with the requirements, the transcript of my customer call where I went over the design proposal and the well labeled architecture diagram I did.

I told ChatGPT (didn’t use Codex) I needed Terraform for the architecture. I asked it for suggestions. I filled in a few blanks and just started copying and pasting the files to my IDE (yeah I know there is a better way. I am getting to that)

Here is where the little vibe coding comes in. Another guy wrote the web front end for the client. I don’t do web programming. I needed to remove the customer specific requirements so yeah, I just told Claude Code what I needed to do and it did it. I threw it on our internal GitHub account in case I needed it later as a generic reusable solution.

Ends up I could use it for my next project - but they wanted CloudFormation. I have certain patterns, helper scripts, shell scripts I use when doing CloudFormation deployments that I developed (and put through the open source process) at AWS.

I created a folder with both my Terraform based project and my CFT reference project and used Claude Code to convert one piece at the time.

On the software development side, on that same project, I designed the backend API how I wanted it to be exposed and the architecture. I’m not ashamed to admit I didn’t write a single line of code and it was all AI generated.

I did the customer facing work, the design, the architecture, delivery, etc. I stand by the architecture.

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thats-bait.gif

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