I wouldn't call it "vibe coded slop" the models are getting way better and I can work with my engineers a lot faster.
I am the founder and a product person so it helps in reducing the number of needed engineers at my business. We are currently doing $2.5M ARR and the engineers aren't complaining, in fact it is the opposite, they are actually more productive.
We still prioritize architecture planning, testing and having a CI, but code is getting less and less important in our team, so we don't need many engineers.
> code is getting less and less important in our team, so we don't need many engineers.
That's a bit reductive. Programmers write code; engineers build systems.
I'd argue that you still need engineers for architecture, system design, protocol design, API design, tech stack evaluation & selection, rollout strategies, etc, and most of this has to be unambiguously documented in a format LLMs can understand.
While I agree that the value of code has decreased now that we can generate and regenerate code from specs, we still need a substantial number of experienced engineers to curate all the specs and inputs that we feed into LLMs.
> we can generate and regenerate code from specs
We can (unreliably) write more code in natural english now. At its core it’s the same thing: detailed instructions telling the computer what it should do.
Maybe the code itself is less important now, relative to the specification.
> the engineers aren't complaining, in fact it is the opposite, they are actually more productive.
More productive isn't the opposite of complaining.
I don't hear any either way.
If an engineer complains in the woods and nobody is around to hear them, did they even complain at all?
> and a product person
Tells me all I need to know about your ability for sound judgement on technical topics right there.
> so it helps in reducing the number of needed engineers at my business
> the engineers aren't complaining
You're missing a piece of the puzzle here, Mr business person.
I mean our MRR and ARR is growing so we must be doing something right.
WeWork thought that as well.
> reducing the number of needed engineers at my business
> code is getting less and less important in our team
> the engineers aren't complaining
lays off engineers for ai trained off of other engineer's code and says code is less important and engineers aren't complaining.
Um, yes?
They can focus on other things that are more impactful in the business rather than just slinging code all day, they can actually look at design and the product!
Maximum headcount for engineers is around 7, no more than that now. I used to have 20, but with AI we don't need that many for our size.
> Maximum headcount for engineers is around 7, no more than that now. I used to have 20,
If I survived having 65% of my colleagues laid off you'd better believe I wouldn't complain in public.
BigTTYGothGF is right
I'd also be looking for a new job that values the skills I've spent a decade building.
I wonder if the remaining engineers' salary increased by the salary of the laid off coworkers'
Yeah or start my own company since they're basically doing everything now it sounds like.
Someone barking orders at you to generate code because they are too stupid to be able to read it is not very fun.
These people hire developers because their own brains are inferior, and now they think they can replace them because they don't want to share the wages with them.
> I wonder if the remaining engineers' salary increased by the salary of the laid off coworkers'
Never does.
Yeah I'm sure they aren't complaining because you'll just lay them off like the others.
I don't see how you could think 7 engineers would love the workload of 20 engineers, extra tooling or not.
Have fun with the tech debt in a few years.
thats the trouble I see with AI and management.
Management may see a churn of a few years as acceptable. If management makes 1$M in that time.. they wont care. "Once I get mine, I don't care"
Like my old CEO who moved out of state to avoid a massive tax bill, got his payout, became hands off, and let the company slide to be almost worthless.
Or at my current company there is no care for quality since we're just going to launch a new generation of product in 3 years. We're doing things here that will CAUSE a ground up rewrite. We're writing code to rely on undocumented features of the mcu that the vendor have said 'we cannot guarantee it will always behave this way' But our management cycles out every 3-4 years. Just enough time to kill the old, champion the new, get their bonus, and move on. Bonuses are handed out every January. Like clockwork there's between 3-7 directors and above who either get promoted or leave in February.
I don't see how any business person would see any value in engineering that extends past their tenure. They see value in launching/delivering/selling, and are rolling the dice that we're JUST able to not cause a nation wide outage or brick every device.
So AI is great... as long as I've 'gotten mine' before it explodes
What do the spends for AI/LLM services look like per person? Do you track any dev/AI metrics related to how the usage is in the company?
[flagged]
Of course I did, however:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html