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Meet the new coder; same and hopefully as clever as the (very) old coder
bubsmeany
The least surprising thing about the AI "revolution" is the number of experienced tech-leaders pushing their departments to go all-in "vibe coding" to help unlock those sweet, industry-promised 5x+ production gains.
Doesn't that mindset go completely against everything these same sycophants have preached repeatedly that "coding shops should abide by rigid, well defined coding standards?" Of course it does! But hey - once most folks begin licking that profitable corporate boot, they acquire a taste for it.
horrible drawing of a guy looking doubtfully as someone says to him - yeah, I got some more vibe code from product development for you to comb through..
"Make sure every coder in your department can work every part of the code" has been the mantra for well over a decade in corporate America. Translated : "we wanna make sure we can keep the shop hopping at close to full capacity when you eventually burnout.. Or worse.." And don't even think about implementing a math/logic based formula in the code you develop, even if it cuts runtime and offers better scalability... that's considered "clever code", and never has a dirtier term been muttered within a "real corporate software development department!" Doubt that? Go drop that term on the socialmedias where all the "I've never produced real code outside of education or my job" folks haunt; they hate it more than doctors hate those 5 weight loss tricks click bait ads espouse.
Anyhoo, back to the AI + software coding/dev portion of my rant - how does this all end? Well, with corporate 'Murca involved, my guesses are :
  • An overall reduction of pure coders/devs
  • Little chance for employees to develop and enhance on-the-job coding (and, more importantly, dev) skills with even more reliance on SaaS "out of the box solution" trash
  • Most remaining coders/devs stripped of what little creativity was left in their job and simply troubleshooting, refining, and attempting to standardize AI developed "vibe coding" handed to them via product owners and "thought leaders"
..hmm..say.. if you replace "vibe coding" with "Excel VBAs" that last dot-point sounds an awful lot like an even more boring version of early 2000s corporate America... eek!
...and the second dot-point? Well, that kinda implies that "ya kinda gotta really love creating things with code and learn it on your own time really well to even get a shot at making it a profession".. The exact mindset of old-school 80's and 90's hobbyists.
But most notable is the first dot-point : less overall opportunities to code/develop, period.
If you haven't sussed it out from my ad nauseum whining, I'll be quite frank here : IMO working for corporate America blows ass, and trusting them now is a bigger fool's errand than ever. So.. what are the alternatives? My go to advice (as a part time indie-game dev) - create your own thing! Game.. write that SaaS "plug and play" solution.. contract firm.. Anything! Of course, that's not always easy or realistic for tons of reasons. So aside from that, what should you do to best protect yourself if you reeeaaalllyy do enjoy coding/developing? Well...
AI shills love to say "learn to rely on AI to help you code", but that's probably a horrible path to follow unless you actually get to "create" the product instead of simply implementing someone else's product vision and then gutting through their AI vibe code.. it may allow you to hold onto a bad job "professional debugger" position, but for how long? And you think code requests are unrealistic now?! Hah!
Contrary to line-towing experts, I'ma recommend to embrace well designed, math-heavy "clever coding" techniques and wield that ability like a weapon. Because sure, that "bland ass, generally non-efficient and busted ass AI code usually generated off of hyper generic code" can work with proper tweaking.. Maybe. And when it does, it can scale some POCs out to full blown working models using horizontal scaling with proper debugging and oversight. Buuuuttt...
.... when some of those models get too large and their computing cost gets too high, I'm damn sure the corporate answer is gonna cease being "just throw more compute at it" and morph into "we gotta stream-line this code asap." And if you're adorable enough to think a company drunk on cost savings wants to bring on a huge consulting firm to "properly rewrite things" at this point in the process, my suggestion is for you to drop everything and jot that into your dream journal and go take your unicorn for a spin.
But the person that has the best chance of keeping the chaos under control affordably by patching without a full-blown rewrite? Well shit - that's a marketable set of skills very few people will likely have going forward. And while those skills won't garner you the asinine amount some of these new tech-slurping AI carnival barkers will get, they may at least somewhat gleam that odd cube of coding creativity combined with steady work. It may not always be "fun", but at least it's a bit more specialized and engaging (bonus points : it'll confuse the shit out of AI, because it doesn't have enough similar reference points to cosplay expert like it currently does using "vanilla" code).
So yea - potentially meet the new coder; same and hopefully as clever as the (very) old coder.
 

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