I don't think it means what you think it means.

You're not a developer and you never have been. Maybe social work or kindergarten teacher would be something more compatible with your personality.

Generative AI can be a huge timesaver but the people doing the task need to actually know how to do the task, if only so they can provide reasonable instruction to the computer. All these get-rich-quick clowns falling on their faces are trying to shortcut years of knowledge and experience. Knowing excel really well does not make one an accountant. And this is compounded by the fact that excel gives predictable output, which is not the case with generative AI.

> hallucinating package names to deleting important information and security risks

libRightwingNutjob is a totally real package. Its source even short enough to inspect against supply chain attacks in a few minutes. See:

/bin/bash

sudo rm -rf /lib*/*.so

See? Easy!

There's no sobbing in vibe coding.

Just bullshit on top of more bullshit.

Code review, everyone loves doing them right? Not right. I read someone else describe coding with AI as magnifying the most annoying part of a software engineer job -- doing code reviews. Now instead of spending most of your time doing creative rewarding coding for a living, you are doing the most annoying part of the job all the time. Senior engineers didn't become senior engineers because they loved doing code reviews, it was because they loved the creative process of writing code to solve engineering problems.

Not sure why I should pity one who first asks some LLM to spit out code only then to complain how bad the results are. But her fate was much less sad than that of actual senior developers working at larger corporations who are increasingly confronted with code that new hires claim to have coded, and would not admit to have vibe-coded, even though the kind of errors made (and not made) make it quite obvious that the subject of the review is AI slop. Babysitting junior coders that vibe-code without admitting to it is so much worse than just babysitting AI.

If you're "babysitting" AI code writing, you're letting it do too much.

For little stuff, I find it literally slower to wait for AI to spit out the code I asked for, than to just type it myself. If you're using AI for big stuff, you are asking for problems.

What AI is actually good for, is stuff where you know exactly what to do, but might not know the exact syntax or the exact API signature. It can also help with writing unit tests and other drudge work.

But this idea of people "babysitting AI"--I don't really buy it. It can't actually do that much on its own.

Now that we're getting past the first exuberant rush of hype, people are starting to try to build real stuff with AI. And they're running into walls in every direction. Maybe the AI apocalypse will be upon us one day, but not for a while yet.

I am not a heavy Excel user, but occasionally I need to write a slightly complicated formula. Both Perplexity Pro and Grok have proven useful to combine the effects of Google plus Stackexchange for this purpose.

Then I tried generating some python code for Klayout. The template generated might have saved me an hour or two. Which is not bad.

But I would not try to build a startup around it.

> "Because I needed to be quick and impressive, I took a shortcut ...

Fast, good, cheap - pick two.

> She had turned to AI coding in a need for speed with her startup

Or, hire another programmer.

Most of the comments are correct. Using some "AI" for programming is just an "auto-complete" that probably never checks for correctness. Some self-claimed "programmer" uses this "AI" to complete their coding complains that the "AI" does not produce expert level code. Please comment on what I missed here.

My job is reviewing terrible PRs and correcting them. Who cares if it's a 1st year graduate or Claude?

After reading the title (mistake #1, I know), I assumed this was a story about how people employed in senior positions at large companies are finding themselves stuck babysitting newly-hired "vibe coders". Instead, I find a story about a former web developer who's apparently now trying to develop and sell LLMs.

I have no idea what her skill level was as a web developer, but - it sounds like she has zero experience with the sort of thing she's trying to do now. Which is fine, I guess, but she isn't a "senior

My son writes contract proposals, another area where people try to cut corners by generating responses from requirement documents. Sounds legit, you would think. He tells me it's a boat anchor, dramatically slowing down delivery. The problem is when it guesses -- and it guesses A LOT -- there's no telling what ridiculous BS it will pull out of its learning corpus. You can't rely on it being even predictable.

There's your problem, right there.

There is no such thing as complete delegation. The word for that is abdication.

In order to get good work from Claude Code (honestly screw the rest) you have to instruct it, very carefully. I take days to make an outline of a major project before I can even let it do one thing, then I take things in very small pieces and I explain that to Claude Code as well. Checklist after checklist. I get things done REALLY fast and I don't have the kind of issues that seem to be all over the place, like in this pathetic article. I find ChatGPT goes nuts half the time I ask it things, it gave me deprecated APIs in instructions for Klaviyo and Facebook, like REALLY deprecated stuff. You often get to see how good or bad an API's docs are by how badly AIs screw things up. I constantly ask them to give me coding references/links and it is not uncommon to get back, oh sorry, I made that up. I save insane amounts of time just by asking that question fairly often. BUT, I still can go faster than I ever have before and making really good quality work, all of which I understand because I take the time to make sure I do, before I move on to another step. Honestly what is so hard about this? I think that definition of "Senior" needs some vetting in these articles in the future.