A software engineer with 25 years industry experience under hardcore conditions.
He/she decides to vibe code a project from scratch.
Success or no?
Discussion
As a software engineer with 15 years experience. I I personally struggle with vibe coding. I tend to want to fix the bad code.
Interesting. I would think you’d have an easier time as you know way more about what has to happen in to background than me who has zero quality experience.
Low ego->wild success.
Interesting. Why?
It’s a razor that seems applicable in any domain.
1. You have to love the problem you want to solve more than your ego.
2. Speed is everything
I could be wrong and my sample size is 5 engineers on this new paradigm.
The newer engineers and the older engineers that seem to thrive are lazy smart. They want to do less work. And they build in small sprints to tackle the next assumption. They care the most about a solution and less than their title of engineer. AI is like a god send. One of these engineers is a top 1,000 in the World who I’ve loved working with for 10 years or so. He was adamant about embracing this. Never once did he feel threatened.
The ones that feel like it’s coming for their job or that they need to go into ego preservation mode tend to dismiss everything quickly. Or so it seems. Newer engineers in this category (2-5 years fresh out of code school or something) with this problem threw their hands up and just switched careers. Again I have a small sample size it just seems the pattern is whether they want to be right or want to be apart of the right solution.
The main point is you cannot be high ego and solution oriented at the same time. You have to love the problem more than your ego or you will hate AI because it’s a threat. If you have low ego, that many years of experience and see how much faster you can go then I’m betting on that person 100 times out of 100.
Depends on the vibe
Colleagues that aren't semi-retired already with that level of experience are having a blast. They are vibe coding tooling around it so that everyone on the team can realize the benefits of vibe coding even on a large enterprise code base. I think everyone is convinced recently that this will be a real productivity boost. Very confident compared to 6 months ago. Reasoning process flows + large context windows unlocked a lot.
My anecdotal experience is that more senior engineers are handling this better since they were already at the point in their career where coding was no longer interesting and software engineering became mostly having clear design and architecture goals and then delegating tasks to the team.
Depends on whether it’s a TODO list or not?
25 years of experience engineers from the beginning of the project, the spirit of adventure, like in the marina to watch the sailboat set sail - no matter whether it is successful or not, the marina scenery against the intrusion of the spirit, just like the code hidden unknown surprises, maybe tossed out of the “sailing trajectory”, even cooler than the pre-set course, and so on. Looking forward to this “code sea adventure” 🌊
https://bsky.app/profile/yachttrading.bsky.social/post/3lnzfwrnqlc2s