Technology

These types of articles always fail to mention how well trained the developers were on techniques and tools. In my experience that makes a big difference.

My employer mandates we use AI and provides us with any model, IDE, service we ask for. But where it falls short is providing training or direction on ways to use it. Most developers seem to go for results prompting and get a terrible experience.

I on the other hand provide a lot of context through documents and various mcp tooling, I talk about the existing patterns in the codebase and provide sources to other repositories as examples, then we come up with an implementation plan and execute on it with a task log to stay on track. I spend very little time fixing bad code because I spent the setup time nailing down context.

So if a developer is just prompting "Do XYZ". It's no wonder they're spending more time untangling a random mess.

Another aspect is that everyone seems to always be working under the gun and they just don't have the time to figure out all the best practices and techniques on their own.

I think this should be considered when we hear things like this.

LLMs/"Vibe Coding" is probably a little bit more useful than the average intern with some tasks bumping up to an early career hire (what would historically be a Junior Engineer before title inflation/stagnation).

As in: it can generate code that might do what you want. But you need (actual) senior engineers to review the code thoroughly. And... how do people get the experience they need to do that?

Which basically results in turning everyone into a manager. Except your reports aren't humans and you don't get more pay. Instead your reports are vscode plugins. Which... sounds like absolute hell but I can get why the (wannabe) management class loves that.

I've found success using more powerful LLMs to help me create applications using the Rust programming language. If you use a weak LLM and ask it to do something very difficult you'll get bad results. You still need to have a fundamental understanding of good coding practices. Using an LLM to code doesn't replace the decision making.