Why would OpenAI vibe code anything? They have hundreds of experienced software engineers. Vibe coding is meant to replace an intern, not your actual team.
They don't want to get into specific industries (AI for software development, AI for business process management, AI for knowledge workers). They just do the AI component. Maybe that's changing now, but they still let other people take the risks - you know, people who are passionate about coding. Then when the product is proven, they might acquire it.
Why would you replace an intern with AI? The goal is to give someone experience and make them come back for a job later. If you replace interns with AI, don’t complain about not getting developers later.
My honest take? Vibe coding makes a senior engineer 2-4x more productive depending on the project. Very large projects see diminishing returns down to 0% productivity gain or negative. I can probably supervise 10 concurrent vibe coding sessions with a little thought on how to structure the tasks and code. This is like giving each of your top engineers their own staff.
The AI coders are different from human coders in what they can and can’t do, they are both profoundly dumb - and extremely technically proficient *at the same time*.
I recently spent 2 weeks fixing a project that a senior engineer seemingly vibe coded while I was on holiday. Prior to that, their work output was excellent in terms of quality and pace.
Those 2 weeks were absolute hell for me. I estimate I had to rewrite about 90% of the code. Everything was cobbled together and ultimately disposable. Unfortunately, this work was meant to be the first of several milestones and was completely unsalvageable as a foundation for the project.
I'm not opposed to using AI tools, I use them myself. But being on the receiving end and having to deal with someone else's vibe coded rubbish is truly dreadful.
I am opposed to them. I'm tired of being pushed by people who don't understand the profession to use crappy tools to be unrealistically productive. I hate what their presence has done to the industry and to the expectations placed on us.
I disagree with this negative take.
I can use Claude to quickly explore libraries, I’m not familiar with, and have developed a development process where I describe the purpose of each class and method in a markdown file , and have Claude, Gemini, deep seek and Chat all pitch descriptions of how to implement it in shared markdown files. I correct their misconceptions and inefficiencies before any code is written,
I can write this code myself, but I’m finding I can work faster like this.
Importantly this is how I work on my own personal fun projects, so it really doesn't matter if is productive, I find it enjoyable so I'm going to keep exploring it, there will be pros and cons, don't have the final ficture on that yet
claude can't manage the big picture of what I'm trying to achieve, and claude and the others hallucinate all the time.
I have them all write simple tests for the code, so if they introduce me to a new library, I have tests to prove their assumptions.
And I review everything and tweak everything.
In my day job I work as a lead dev / arch, this isn't must different, working with Claude is like working with a large team of very inconsistent devs, with deep knowledge, but a tenous grasp on reality that struggle with attention. So not that much different from real people?
My dad wrote code generators, back in the 70's and 80's that I did some work on early in my career, those code generators which took a high level description of a program and output mainframe code, made most of the money that paid for raising my siblings and I. From that perspective I've been roboting myself my entire professional life.
They don't want to get into specific industries (AI for software development, AI for business process management, AI for knowledge workers). They just do the AI component. Maybe that's changing now, but they still let other people take the risks - you know, people who are passionate about coding. Then when the product is proven, they might acquire it.