I am responsible for a team of engineers. I wouldn’t say I “lead” them, per se. I let them lead their own groups and add my perspective when asked (or when I see them going off a cliff and I need to prevent it). But I am their boss and when they fuck something up I cover for them and take the hit.
Some are very senior, like 20+ years of experience. They have seen it all and have the battle scars to prove it. They are set in their ways. Some will only use the particular technical stack they are experts in, so every application turns into a massive microservicey barge with an accordingly bloated front end client. Others enjoy learning new stuff but are stubborn about adding new workflow tools or learning new approaches to shipping software. I love these people.
Others are very junior, like this-is-my-first-job-what-is-the-command-line. They are eager to learn, eager to jump in, and eager to figure out how to accelerate their progress using all tools available… like AI. I love these people, too.
I have made it clear that I support judicious use of AI. What does that mean? No one knows! The entire industry is trying to figure it out. There are plenty of breathless posts from asshole exec types or bullshitting influencers claiming to have built and shipped a SaaS in a week that has already achieved $1M ARR! What does it look like in practice? It takes different forms.
AI-assisted coding is just that — you ask an AI to explain something to you or to refactor something or to write a function with well-defined inputs and outputs. Maybe you have cash to burn and plan through a big feature with the AI, then tell it to “git er done”. It depends on how deep into the code you want to go.
Vibe-coding is when you ask the AI to do something technical in less defined, squishy language. “Build me a twitter clone”, “Make the X page look similar to the Y page”, “Write tests and run them and make sure they pass”. Vibe coding is a cool way to build a mostly functional POC quickly. It’s absolute poison to anything you’ll be deploying to production. Security holes, edge case bugs, missing features that you assumed the AI would magically know about… expect that and more.
This is a small overview for those fortunate souls who aren’t up to their neck in breathless tech news and earnings reports.
Tech Sucks 