[TranquilMarmot]

This is great until the "gun to your head" is your skip-level manager demanding that a feature be implemented by the end of the week, and they know you can just "generate it with AI" so that timeline is actually realistic now whereas two years ago it would have required careful planning, testing, and execution.

[fransje26]

Well, that's nice.

Your manager is unknowingly helping you create a form of job security for yourself, with all the technical debt and bugs being accumulated.

He might not understand it, and it might not be the type of work you want to do, but someone is going to have to fix those issues. And the longer they wait, the bigger the task gets.

[anygivnthursday]

That isn't new, though. Managers often pushed unrealistic timelines and showed lack of care about tech debt well before vibe coding, just the timelines where different, and the magnitude will be bigger this time. But we also have LLMs to help it clean it up faster, I guess.

[2ndorderthought]

The question is, is it a job you actually still want once the poo pile reaches critical mass you are the only one with a shovel and the deadline is "yesterday"

[fransje26]

That is absolutely true. Unfortunately, this ship has sailed and we are not closing Pandora's box anymore. We'll have to adapt.

But we still hold good cards in hand.

Do they want their pile of steaming slop fixed, or not? Because no amount of complaints about the deadline being "yesterday" are going to change anything about the fact that time will be needed to fix the accrued technical debt, whether they like it or not.. And if AI dug you in that deep to start with, the solution is not to dig deeper.

I suspect some companies are going to find that out the hard (costly) way.

[TranquilMarmot]

The bet that management is making is that the AI will continue to improve and that it will be able to fix those issues on the cheap - so far this has proven to be true for us. We use AI to generate code at scale, that code has issues at scale, so we use AI to fix those issues.

[wccrawford]

If the manager is unreasonable, you were always going to have a problem with them, eventually. Nothing you can do with fix this.

If manage is reasonable, you can explain to them that there isn't time to check the work of the AI, and that it frequently makes obscure mistakes that need to be properly checked, and that takes time.

At this point, if they still insist you just give it the AI's work, they've made a decision that is their fault. You've done what you can.

And when the shit hits the fan, we're back to whether they're reasonable or not. If they are, you explained what could happen and it did. If they force responsibility on you, they aren't reasonable and were never going to listen to you. That time bomb was always going to go off.

[TranquilMarmot]

The problem is that this mode of operation for them works - they get the features made in a fraction of the time it used to take, the feature does what it says on the tin, they feel good about pushing the product in a specific direction. If something goes wrong, the AI can fix it, too.

I'm not sure that there's really a "bomb" hiding in here anywhere. The issue is that it IS "reasonable" now to expect big features to be done within a week.

[baddash]

Great point! Looks like you got some strategies for dealing with managers lol

[nertirs3]

I hate this current trend of managers deciding, what tools developers have to use. Hopefully it ends soon.

[nikau]

Time will tell if outages and defect resolution sky rocket or if ai can deal with it

[adrianN]

Does that matter that much in practice? I bet lots of costumers are okay with software that crashes 10x as much if it costs 10x less. There already is a ton of shitty software that still sells.

[drchickensalad]

> if it costs 10x less

This will not happen. Nobody desires to give that up. Also AI does not deliver even remotely that much true value multiplier