Comment by herval
21 hours ago
My personal experience: I shipped multiple features at work in the past 6 months that I simply wouldn’t have tried shipping otherwise, since my day job is mostly management. AI wrote maybe 80% of the code, I spent a bit of time rewriting some parts. No major bugs so far (ironically, the one big bug the team had to revert was done entirely by me)
I can guarantee I wouldn’t have shipped ANY of it, since it’d require focus blocks I simply don’t have on the job.
I’m also about to ship a Mac app that’s heavily vibecoded. I wouldn’t even try without AI, since I’m not a Swift developer.
Those aren’t “illusions” of performance. I imagine it’s hard to gauge every single scenario, and sensationalist takes like this research elicit an emotional response on the anti-AI crowd, but denying the impact is simply ignorance at this point…
> Those aren’t “illusions” of performance.
Given that your job is not software development but management, you spending time delivering features is effectively removing time from doing your job.
If you had spent managing the same time you spent vibe-coding, maybe it would have been a force-multiplier for your reportees and your team might have been more productive as a whole than the added productivity of your vibe-coding.
This is absolutely an illusion of performance.
I tend to agree here. I haven't been allowed to code for a few years now but I spend a lot of my time talking through code with developers. I find many of the people on my teams lack a perspective I can provide to frame a problem or evaluate an approach.
I also help them get to the heart of problems quickly simply because I'm not stuck in the code all day. For example, if I see a developer taking too long to identify the source of a bug, I'll get on a call and get them to take me through that code and get them prove any assumption ("ok, show me the code that checks that value is greater than zero").
By doing this I'm using my coding experience directly without actually coding. I'd consider coding a huge waste of time for me, but spending 30 minutes to unstick a developer when I am sure they should have found the problem by now seems like a really good use of my time.
It also lets people know they can't just spend three days on something that should take a couple hours without someone checking in, which I don't live having to do but it's a reality for some teams I work with.
> Given that your job is not software development but management, you spending time delivering features is effectively removing time from doing your job.
It most definitely isn’t. With all due respect, I know my job and my schedule more than you and your baseless assumptions.