7 ms·

We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up, which more often than not are Rube Golberg-esque

We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up, which more often than not are Rube Golberg-esque contraptions, that you have to conversationally reverse engineer to arrive at the actual requirements. In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive to look at design and architecture holistically. Just make it like that. And why do you need to spend X man hours? The thing is basically already done!

gwerbin 3mo ago
I have seen this already. Vibecoded top to bottom. The downside is that the business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production as is. And then there's a lot of pressure to make it happen quickly "because we can use AI to move fast". This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership. The upside is that the idea has already been proven out much more thoroughly than a sketch on a napkin. Claude has already prompted them about edge cases and design decisions. It's very likely that at some point they had to explicitly tell Claude "don't worry about that and just make an assumption", or "I actually don't like that interaction after trying it a few times, can you do a differently". They had to write out much of their idea in clear and direct language in order to prompt the AI. They've probably been playing with their own toy because it's fun to play with toys you summoned from thin air, so they've had a chance to discover the experience and refine their own preferences. It's probably a net negative right now because the "ship it what's the problem team" pressure is intense and stupid and demoralizing and miserable to work under. But I think it will stabilize and it might be a net positive in future projects.
- iamjs 3mo ago
  > It's very likely that at some point they had to explicitly tell Claude "don't worry about that and just make an assumption", Non technical folks vibe coding aren't explicitly telling Claude anything other than "Accept"
- slyzmud 3mo ago
  I've working on a small side project with a non technical friend for a couple months. It's really small but we are selling it to some clients. The other day my friend discovered lovable and vibe coded an entire app and he started feeling like I was scamming him. Why would I take weeks or months in building our app if he could do it on hours? He might be stubborn but ended up blindly believing me, but I couldn't find a good way of explaining that a prototype wasn't a final product. It has lots of errors, doesn't consider edge cases and it's impossible to fix if something breaks. Of course what I said didn't mean much because he didn't understand what I was talking about. How do you communicate this problem? That there's much more than what you see in a frontend? Seems really hard to explain to non technical people.
  - gwerbin 3mo ago
    It's the same problem we've had all along though, right? Maybe it's magnified now but the essence of the confusion is the same.
  - 9rx 3mo ago
    Show it. Pick a missed edge case or breaking point in his app and demonstrate the pain the customer is going to encounter. You don't have to live in the realm of hypotheticals. He has given you a concrete, but flawed, implementation that offers proof of your message.
    - slyzmud 3mo ago
      I did it and he "fixed" it with AI, making him even more convinced of it. I'm pretty sure something else must have broken but didn't see it immediately. I guess eventually it will fall from its own weight but I'm surprised how far he was able to get.
      - 9rx 3mo ago
        You are convincing me of it too. It is clear that your friend still needs your system thinking to point out edge cases and whatnot, but if you applied that by spending a couple of days adding a test suite to provide the missing validation, it seems like together you could have a pretty robust product built in less than a week. What justifies a couple of months?
- chatmasta 3mo ago
  > business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production I’d flip that around and say that engineers don’t understand that sometimes you _can_ just put their app into production. It might take some cleanup, and some clever ways of deploying it in isolation, but some of these “vibe coded prototypes” — many made by technical business people (they do exist) – are much closer to production-ready than you might initially assume. I’d encourage you to challenge your assumptions before dismissing the possibility. I’ve personally seen this workflow produce real production code, used by customers, in an extremely rapid feedback loop. Now is the time to adapt, not push back. Keep an open mind or you’ll be left behind.
  - preg_match 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - gwerbin 3mo ago
    I actually agree with you, although I don't agree with the "open your mind or be left behind" sentiment. I left it implicit in my example, but in my actual experience they actually can't put it in production as it is because there are genuine broken things or features they can't add without rewriting big chunks of the system. The worst are the ones that are not obviously broken but are just wrong, like incorrect numbers in a financial report. But yes, I do agree that some engineers and some engineering teams are slow and cautious where it's not needed, to the point of obstructing rapid prototyping and iteration. And yes I agree that AI will be good to help push them to overcome it.
    - 8note 3mo ago
      > rewriting big chunks of the system the costs of doing this is much lower than it has been testing to make sure thats safe to do maybe hasnt caught up, but its no longer an unreasonable task
      - gwerbin 3mo ago
        It's not about turning out the necessary lines of code. It's about doing the critical thinking, validating of assumptions, etc. which was not done the first time around. Yes, AI can assist with the brute force of broad scale factoring. But without the humans and domain experts involved, you are going to either keep flailing around at the cost of millions of tokens, or something actually really bad in production that you don't even understand and won't work for your business. The lines of code have never been a bottleneck for the actual engineering team. That's why AI is so good for expediting the prototype cycle and allowing stakeholders to develop their own prototypes, but why you still need someone who actually knows what they're doing to finish the project, whether they are manually typing the lines of code or letting Claude do it.
- 8note 3mo ago
  it would be fun to get access to those chat logs, to pull out detailed requirements decisions and get some more structure together
- bluefirebrand 3mo ago
  > This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership What is it like working for organizations with healthy dynamics and leadership that is capable of learning? I don't think I've ever encountered it in my professional career.
- almostdeadguy 3mo ago
  If you can vibe code it, you can vibe deploy it, and deal with the consequences.
- nitwit005 3mo ago
  That will never get fixed. Early in my career I demoed a Java Swing UI, emphasized it didn't actually do anything repeatedly. A manager declared it done. They'd "seen it working".
ex-aws-dude 3mo ago
I’ve seen that play out already as well Then your job as SE just becomes reviewing and untangling vibe-coded stuff
frde_me 3mo ago
I honestly much prefer this to the old way where the only mode of communication was speech or text. I now often understand a lot more holistically what the person coming with their product wants with just a demo + a conversation. Of course you need the person making that vibe product to understand it's just a mockup of their idea and that it'll change. But I would argue this has always been a necessary quality for a product person.
- dominotw 3mo ago
  thats really sad that only way you can understand something is with pictures and demos. like a little toddler. when they already come up with a working model it doesnt really leave any room for abstract thought because now you are in concerte world . They see you as a machine that turns mocks into impls ( maybe you youself see yourself like that). its ok if you see yourself as a code monkey monkey doing menial job of implementing someones mockup. But that job wont be here long and you will be on the streets holding "can turn working mocks to production code for food" signs. honestly your attitude scares me more than some business guy building crap in lovable.
  - throwaway98797 3mo ago
    no business person will ever want to consider the right tradeoffs without being forced to the ai making assumptions can’t get it right
  - frde_me 3mo ago
    I can understand words, but having more diverse medias for communication lets a person express strictly more than before. Sometimes words are better, sometimes a visual demo is better. Is your solution to the problem you presented that you should artificially restrict what a person can express just to keep your own personal moat? I prefer the alternative, let a person express themselves and grow thanks to AI, while keeping the necessary culture and boundaries to where it's also accepted for _me_ to cross boundaries and express my ideas to them in the same way. Or suggest other ways to express those ideas. We then become a marketplace of ideas in a much deeper sense than before, where product managers would already expect you to implement what they want, but without them being able to convey it properly. If I didn't have original ideas and didn't think I could compete in that marketplace of ideas, I would be scared like you convey in your message. But I'm confident that my value is not about translating things into code, it's because I have original thoughts I can convey to other people (and to AIs). (and about understanding architecture and systems to a degree that keeps me valuable even if all the code itself is written by AI without my direct involvement)
girvo 3mo ago
I can say that its happening right now (not where I work, at a place I used to). Even being shipped to production as-is, with data loss and security issues in tow. We're cooked haha
darth_avocado 3mo ago
> We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up We have that too and more often than not, it’s not what a customer wants. Yes there are some very talented customer facing people (PMs, CSMs, TAMs etc.) that also have a natural knack for translating customer problems into product features with great usability. However, for the rest, skipping the part of defining the problem and letting other functions to come up with a solution, usually leads to catastrophic messes that waste a lot of engineering and other resources. When someone shows up with a solution, you risk wasting months of resources in making production ready software, only to find, customers hate it and the solution either doesn’t fix the problem or introduces new ones.
cube00 3mo ago
> The thing is basically already done! I'm seeing so many of these come in with "this is 95% done, just need a couple of minor tweaks for production release" "Minor tweaks" being fix the layout so it's not messed up if the browser isn't exactly 1920px wide, sometimes these filters and sorting don't seem to work right and the app doesn't seem to refresh new values properly after an action. No matter the issue it's pre-estimated by the business as "should be a quick fix, for an experienced dev" because they (allegedly) did 95% of the work already.
- getnormality 3mo ago
  Could we hop on a quick call to get a quick status on that quick fix?
  - cube00 3mo ago
    Just wanted to check in on how we're tracking, I've booked a quick sync meeting for 4:45pm on Friday followed by a release cadence checkpoint meeting for 9am on Monday.
Nition 3mo ago
> In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive This has already been common in the audio engineering world for some time, as home demos of music approach professional quality. As you forsee here, people get used to what they have and become even less inclined to accept changes in a new professional mix.
- testdelacc1 3mo ago
  There was this video which showed film directors doing something similar. They film their scene with “filler” music previously used in some other film. Then they hand the scene to the music director and ask a score for it, which forces the director to make something very similar to the filler music. It then makes all film music sound similar. This was only possible due to the “productivity boost” of digital editing pipelines, which allowed directors to edit immediately after filming. https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs from 5:50 on but the whole video is a masterpiece.

gwerbin 3mo ago

I have seen this already. Vibecoded top to bottom. The downside is that the business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production as is. And then there's a lot of pressure to make it happen quickly "because we can use AI to move fast". This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership. The upside is that the idea has already been proven out much more thoroughly than a sketch on a napkin. Claude has already prompted them about edge cases and design decisions. It's very likely that at some point they had to explicitly tell Claude "don't worry about that and just make an assumption", or "I actually don't like that interaction after trying it a few times, can you do a differently". They had to write out much of their idea in clear and direct language in order to prompt the AI. They've probably been playing with their own toy because it's fun to play with toys you summoned from thin air, so they've had a chance to discover the experience and refine their own preferences. It's probably a net negative right now because the "ship it what's the problem team" pressure is intense and stupid and demoralizing and miserable to work under. But I think it will stabilize and it might be a net positive in future projects.

iamjs 3mo ago
> It's very likely that at some point they had to explicitly tell Claude "don't worry about that and just make an assumption", Non technical folks vibe coding aren't explicitly telling Claude anything other than "Accept"
slyzmud 3mo ago
I've working on a small side project with a non technical friend for a couple months. It's really small but we are selling it to some clients. The other day my friend discovered lovable and vibe coded an entire app and he started feeling like I was scamming him. Why would I take weeks or months in building our app if he could do it on hours? He might be stubborn but ended up blindly believing me, but I couldn't find a good way of explaining that a prototype wasn't a final product. It has lots of errors, doesn't consider edge cases and it's impossible to fix if something breaks. Of course what I said didn't mean much because he didn't understand what I was talking about. How do you communicate this problem? That there's much more than what you see in a frontend? Seems really hard to explain to non technical people.
- gwerbin 3mo ago
  It's the same problem we've had all along though, right? Maybe it's magnified now but the essence of the confusion is the same.
- 9rx 3mo ago
  Show it. Pick a missed edge case or breaking point in his app and demonstrate the pain the customer is going to encounter. You don't have to live in the realm of hypotheticals. He has given you a concrete, but flawed, implementation that offers proof of your message.
  - slyzmud 3mo ago
    I did it and he "fixed" it with AI, making him even more convinced of it. I'm pretty sure something else must have broken but didn't see it immediately. I guess eventually it will fall from its own weight but I'm surprised how far he was able to get.
    - 9rx 3mo ago
      You are convincing me of it too. It is clear that your friend still needs your system thinking to point out edge cases and whatnot, but if you applied that by spending a couple of days adding a test suite to provide the missing validation, it seems like together you could have a pretty robust product built in less than a week. What justifies a couple of months?
chatmasta 3mo ago
> business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production I’d flip that around and say that engineers don’t understand that sometimes you _can_ just put their app into production. It might take some cleanup, and some clever ways of deploying it in isolation, but some of these “vibe coded prototypes” — many made by technical business people (they do exist) – are much closer to production-ready than you might initially assume. I’d encourage you to challenge your assumptions before dismissing the possibility. I’ve personally seen this workflow produce real production code, used by customers, in an extremely rapid feedback loop. Now is the time to adapt, not push back. Keep an open mind or you’ll be left behind.
- preg_match 3mo ago
  [dead]
- gwerbin 3mo ago
  I actually agree with you, although I don't agree with the "open your mind or be left behind" sentiment. I left it implicit in my example, but in my actual experience they actually can't put it in production as it is because there are genuine broken things or features they can't add without rewriting big chunks of the system. The worst are the ones that are not obviously broken but are just wrong, like incorrect numbers in a financial report. But yes, I do agree that some engineers and some engineering teams are slow and cautious where it's not needed, to the point of obstructing rapid prototyping and iteration. And yes I agree that AI will be good to help push them to overcome it.
  - 8note 3mo ago
    > rewriting big chunks of the system the costs of doing this is much lower than it has been testing to make sure thats safe to do maybe hasnt caught up, but its no longer an unreasonable task
    - gwerbin 3mo ago
      It's not about turning out the necessary lines of code. It's about doing the critical thinking, validating of assumptions, etc. which was not done the first time around. Yes, AI can assist with the brute force of broad scale factoring. But without the humans and domain experts involved, you are going to either keep flailing around at the cost of millions of tokens, or something actually really bad in production that you don't even understand and won't work for your business. The lines of code have never been a bottleneck for the actual engineering team. That's why AI is so good for expediting the prototype cycle and allowing stakeholders to develop their own prototypes, but why you still need someone who actually knows what they're doing to finish the project, whether they are manually typing the lines of code or letting Claude do it.
8note 3mo ago
it would be fun to get access to those chat logs, to pull out detailed requirements decisions and get some more structure together
bluefirebrand 3mo ago
> This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership What is it like working for organizations with healthy dynamics and leadership that is capable of learning? I don't think I've ever encountered it in my professional career.
almostdeadguy 3mo ago
If you can vibe code it, you can vibe deploy it, and deal with the consequences.
nitwit005 3mo ago
That will never get fixed. Early in my career I demoed a Java Swing UI, emphasized it didn't actually do anything repeatedly. A manager declared it done. They'd "seen it working".

ex-aws-dude 3mo ago

I’ve seen that play out already as well Then your job as SE just becomes reviewing and untangling vibe-coded stuff

frde_me 3mo ago

I honestly much prefer this to the old way where the only mode of communication was speech or text. I now often understand a lot more holistically what the person coming with their product wants with just a demo + a conversation. Of course you need the person making that vibe product to understand it's just a mockup of their idea and that it'll change. But I would argue this has always been a necessary quality for a product person.

dominotw 3mo ago
thats really sad that only way you can understand something is with pictures and demos. like a little toddler. when they already come up with a working model it doesnt really leave any room for abstract thought because now you are in concerte world . They see you as a machine that turns mocks into impls ( maybe you youself see yourself like that). its ok if you see yourself as a code monkey monkey doing menial job of implementing someones mockup. But that job wont be here long and you will be on the streets holding "can turn working mocks to production code for food" signs. honestly your attitude scares me more than some business guy building crap in lovable.
- throwaway98797 3mo ago
  no business person will ever want to consider the right tradeoffs without being forced to the ai making assumptions can’t get it right
- frde_me 3mo ago
  I can understand words, but having more diverse medias for communication lets a person express strictly more than before. Sometimes words are better, sometimes a visual demo is better. Is your solution to the problem you presented that you should artificially restrict what a person can express just to keep your own personal moat? I prefer the alternative, let a person express themselves and grow thanks to AI, while keeping the necessary culture and boundaries to where it's also accepted for _me_ to cross boundaries and express my ideas to them in the same way. Or suggest other ways to express those ideas. We then become a marketplace of ideas in a much deeper sense than before, where product managers would already expect you to implement what they want, but without them being able to convey it properly. If I didn't have original ideas and didn't think I could compete in that marketplace of ideas, I would be scared like you convey in your message. But I'm confident that my value is not about translating things into code, it's because I have original thoughts I can convey to other people (and to AIs). (and about understanding architecture and systems to a degree that keeps me valuable even if all the code itself is written by AI without my direct involvement)

girvo 3mo ago

I can say that its happening right now (not where I work, at a place I used to). Even being shipped to production as-is, with data loss and security issues in tow. We're cooked haha

darth_avocado 3mo ago

> We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up We have that too and more often than not, it’s not what a customer wants. Yes there are some very talented customer facing people (PMs, CSMs, TAMs etc.) that also have a natural knack for translating customer problems into product features with great usability. However, for the rest, skipping the part of defining the problem and letting other functions to come up with a solution, usually leads to catastrophic messes that waste a lot of engineering and other resources. When someone shows up with a solution, you risk wasting months of resources in making production ready software, only to find, customers hate it and the solution either doesn’t fix the problem or introduces new ones.

cube00 3mo ago

> The thing is basically already done! I'm seeing so many of these come in with "this is 95% done, just need a couple of minor tweaks for production release" "Minor tweaks" being fix the layout so it's not messed up if the browser isn't exactly 1920px wide, sometimes these filters and sorting don't seem to work right and the app doesn't seem to refresh new values properly after an action. No matter the issue it's pre-estimated by the business as "should be a quick fix, for an experienced dev" because they (allegedly) did 95% of the work already.

getnormality 3mo ago
Could we hop on a quick call to get a quick status on that quick fix?
- cube00 3mo ago
  Just wanted to check in on how we're tracking, I've booked a quick sync meeting for 4:45pm on Friday followed by a release cadence checkpoint meeting for 9am on Monday.

Nition 3mo ago

> In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive This has already been common in the audio engineering world for some time, as home demos of music approach professional quality. As you forsee here, people get used to what they have and become even less inclined to accept changes in a new professional mix.

testdelacc1 3mo ago
There was this video which showed film directors doing something similar. They film their scene with “filler” music previously used in some other film. Then they hand the scene to the music director and ask a score for it, which forces the director to make something very similar to the filler music. It then makes all film music sound similar. This was only possible due to the “productivity boost” of digital editing pipelines, which allowed directors to edit immediately after filming. https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs from 5:50 on but the whole video is a masterpiece.