Comment by endofreach
7 hours ago
> I don't know what to think. These blog articles are supposed to be a showcase of engineering expertise, but bragging about having AI vibecode a replacement for a critical part of your system that was questionably designed and costing as much as a fully-loaded FTE per year raises a lot of other questions.
I agree. But most of the time the people responsible for the codebase / architecture do not want those questions raised. AI is greatly appreciated emergency exit for those situations. Apparently.
> But most of the time the people responsible for the codebase / architecture do not want those questions raised.
I don't know if that matches my experience. I've seen plenty of places where the dev teams complain about tech debt and other kludges costing too much, slowing them down and causing other problems, but management don't want to "waste time re-writing working code".
But now that management read on linkedin they can jump on the AI bandwagon by having the team use AI to fix tech debt, there's suddenly time to work on it.
Eliminating manual toil seems like a huge win for LLMs. There are a ton of straightforward-but-tedious projects that no one wants to fund because they take 2 dev weeks to implement and the result is a hard to quantify quality of codebase improvement. Some of these can now be handled by an LLM in a day and so they suddenly become extremely tractable. You don’t have to embrace vibe coding to benefit from cheap debt pay down.