The learning curve is actually huge. If you just vibe code with AI, the results are going to suck. You basically have to reify all of your software engineering artifacts and get AI to iterate on them and your code as if it were am actual software engineering (who forgot everything whenever you rebooted it, so that’s why you have to make sure it can re-read artifacts to get its context back up to speed again). So a lot more planning, design, and test documentation than you would do in a normal project. The nice thing is that AI will maintain all of it as long as you set up the right structure.
We are also in the early days still, I guess everyone has their own way of doing this ATM.
By this point you've burnt up any potential efficiency gains. So you spent a lot of hours learning a new tool which you then have to spend a lot of additional hours to babysit and correct, so much that you'll be very far from those claimed productivity gains. Plus the skills you need to verify and fix it will atrophy. So that learning curve earns you nothing expect the ability to put "AI" somewhere on your CV, which I expect will lose a lot of its lustre in 1-2 years time when everybody has made enough experiences with vibe coders who don't, or no longer can, enusre the quality of their super-efficient output.
Speaking as someone with a ton of experience here.
None of the things they do can go without immense efforts in validation and verification by a human who knows what they're doing.
All of the extra engineering effort could have been spent just making your own infrastructure and procedures far more resilient and valuable to far more people in your team and yourself going forward.
You will burn more and more and more hours overtime because of relying on LLMs for ANYTHING non-trivial. It becomes a technical debt factory.
That's the reality.
Please stop listening to these grifters. Listen to someone who actually knows what they're talking about, like Carl Brown.
That’s interesting but how much of this if written down, documented and made into video tutorials could be learnt by just about any good engineer in 1-2 weeks?
I don’t see much yet, maybe everyone is just winging it until someone influential gives it a name. The vibe coding crowd have set us back a lot, and really so did the whole leetcode interview fad that are just throwing off. It’s kind of obvious though: just tell the AI to do what a normal junior SWE does (like write tests), but write a lot more documentation because they forget things all the time (a junior engineer who makes more mistakes, so they need to test more, and remembers nothing).
We are also in the early days still, I guess everyone has their own way of doing this ATM.