Community post
Experience vs AI: who wins when something breaks in production?
I was just talking with my brother about how things are going and specially at his job in software development. He is an Architect and also Developer Manager, but mostly involved in the technical aspects of the solutions. And what he said is that alongside the hype of AI in his company, many developers did vibe coding and performed a release in Production. And of course everything broke in Production and humans 😁 like my brother had to come to the rescue. Vibe coding and using AI for development activities resulted in a poor quality of the delivered release and a lot of issues were popping out as the customers started using the new version. Letting the AI in the driver seat and him go crazy with changes in the entire project, proved the wrong call here. So in this case it was shown that human experience and the human actor cannot be removed (for now at least) from the software development field.
Now it is clear that the human won against AI, but when something breaks in production guess who is to blame? It is still the human that was vibe coding, not that with this AI hype that matters too much. It is clear that companies push for AI adoption, but in the same time there are the business and technical people that come to the rescue and everything gets messed up. These wrong moves, even if they came from AI, would still have some reflection on the people that are in the driving seat. And there are different waves of firings still taking place, thus AI pushes forward even if the humans are the ones coming from behind and trying to fix the mess.
Another example coming also from my brother is that he had a CR (change request), he looked over it and added some technical details where about two lines of code needed to be changed. The developer that it is not on his team got to the task and did vibe coding on it without following the technical indications from it. And guess what? It ended up changing about 50 classes with whatever AI thought that it helps solving the problem. Which it might, but in the same time it might break other 49 functionalities. And what happens now? Well, they are waiting to see from the customer what brakes. Which is quite bad, but this is how the AI hype affect the working methods and sometimes not in a good way.
So when it comes to things breaking in Production, the human experience wins over AI. But still the human is to blame for whatever AI committed and any vibe coding on that thing. So AI can be seen as a tool, but it is very important to control it and make sure it does only the minimum changes to resolve an issue. Sometimes maybe you don't care having 1000 classes modified, but when it comes to Production releases that simply just doesn't work. While such bad things happened in Production, it seems that the company still moves forward with AI as nothing happened. This is quite chaotic and frustrating for the people working there and that's also because some managers (mostly non technical) are just pushing an agenda without understanding anything. And that's when the battle is lost.
Replies (3)
I don't know if there will ever be a future where AI gets better than humans, but at the moment it looks like it won't. The human mind is just too complex for AI to replicate its problem solving capabilities, and you're right: when AI malfunctions, people are blamed for not using it properly or prompting it well.
From your story, I feel the developers vibe coding don't know how they shall vibe code. Plenty of companies turn towards vibe coding almost eveything, and not breaking their systems. And when breaking, they fix it. Anthrophic claims that almost 100% of the code what makes Claude, is vibe coded. I know several startups in my country, one man shows, run by serious software developers who earned their stripes in past decades, are vibe coding from A to Z. And yes, sometimes they rewrite something by hand, or change a module or function by driving the AI into the direction the developer wants. But they vibe code from A to Z. And yes, all these are as you call: Production. In fact, these are Dutch challengers to WeTransfer and Office365 with quite several customers already. One of my colleagues started vibe coding a few months ago. He was sceptical. I helped push him. Now he is delivering plugins, adapters, logic based on vibe coding. Already today it is implemented in to our IT solutions, used by in increading number of professional companies in our market, from billion-dollar companies to high-critical systems within governments.
Long story short: Vibe coding must be handle through a process. One must know what one does. At least today. In a few years from now, I predict almost anyone can vibe code. In fact, vibe coding will happen without we knowing it. We simply ask for something: I want to order xyz and the AI system does what it needs to do to get this done, including vibe coding when some service logic is not available, or isn't addressing all the rules it needs to followup on the requestors requirements.