To whom it may concern,
I’m worried about our profession.
Not because AI exists - but because we’re letting it dull our standards.
We used to take pride in craftsmanship: understanding systems deeply, writing code with intention, caring about the details. Lately, I’m seeing more and more AI-generated code that should never escape the “proof of concept” phase.
We have all seen the AI slop and how humiliating is. Imagine something worse. Much worse. A fellow software engineer working for a Car Company. The same fellow is working on the part of the car related with the passenger and driver safety (whatever it may be). And imagine the fellow software engineer just vibing it because fellow was lazy to think and let AI do the thinking. Just imagine the consequences.
So I tested myself.
I leaned into AI. Hard. I let it do the work.
And I watched myself get lazy.
Not “I’ll refactor this later” lazy - I don’t even want to move a constant across files lazy. I’d rather prompt than think and act.
Then came the part I didn’t expect: I didn’t get faster.
Maybe that’s on me. But here’s what I learned after a lot of careful prompting, reviewing, re-prompting, and fixing what came out: the supposed speed-up often disappears in the churn. Getting the output into a clean, maintainable state can take more effort than writing it properly yourself.
That’s the trap.
As the saying goes:
It’s not the poison that kills you, it’s the quantity.
Use AI - but use it deliberately.
My ask is simple: don’t outsource your thinking. Don’t let “vibe coding” become your default. AI should assist your craft, not replace it.
Because the ability to engineer software, really engineer it - atrophies when you stop exercising it.
Sincerely,
A fellow engineer
P.S. The irony is that this was post was reviewed by the LLM *sigh*.