AI enthusiasts race against time, AI skeptics race against entropy
A talk about 'vibe coding' excited managers, but colleagues revealed the projects left chaos and cleanup work, highlighting the growing rift between AI optimists and skeptics.
Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. There is a way to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.. Xposted from substack.
I recently attended a talk where one of the presenters made some pretty…astonishing claims about what they had achieved by the pure, uncut power of vibe coding. Difficult engineering problems solved, backlogs cleared. Rewrites that would have taken a year or more in the beforetimes, now whipped out in a few short weeks of prompting. Afterwards, wandering around the conference, I caught a lot of excited chatter:
“I can’t wait to make my teams watch the recording of this talk. My engineers are SO resistant to the idea of shipping code without reading it. Finally, some proof they can’t ignore!”
“Mine are too. It’s so frustrating. People are just so stuck in what they know. I think they’re just scared of being replaced, you know?”
The talk was fantastic. The presenter made it all sound easy, breezy and oh-so-fun.
The problem is, I know lots of other people at his company, and they described these projects as a horror show. Yes, they allowed, some progress was made, and some of it was pretty cool, but he also left a long, fiery trail of chaos in his wake. Months later, some teams were still grinding through waves of cleanup work.