Personally I still believe that despite AI being moderately useful and getting better over time, it's mostly only feasible for boilerplate work. I do wonder about these people claiming to produce millions of lines of code per day with AI, like what are you actually building? If it's then Nth CRUD app then yeah, I see why... Chances are in the grand scheme of things, we don't really need that company to exist.
In roles that require more technical/novel work, AI just doesn't make the cut in my experience. Either it totally falls over or produces such bad results that it'd be quicker for a skilled dev to make it manually from scratch. I'd hope these types of companies are not hiring based on AI usage.
Teams where I work can use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Copilot CLI. Internally, it seems like Claude Code and Codex are the more popular tools being used by most software teams.
If you’re new to these tools, I highly recommend trying to build something with them during your free time. This space has evolved rapidly the past few months. Anthropic is offering a special spring break promotion where you can double the limits on weeknights and weekends for any of its subscription plans until the end of March.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me even as someone who uses agentic programming.
I would understand not hiring people who are against the idea of agentic programming, but I'd take a skilled programmer (especially one who is good at code review and debugging) who never touched agentic/LLM programming (but knows they will be expected to use it) over someone with less overall programming experience (but some agentic programming experience) every single time.
I think people vastly oversell using agents as some sort of skill in its own right when the reality is that a skilled developer can pick up how to use the flows and tools on the timescale of hours/days.
You prompt it. That's it. Yes, there are better and worse ways of prompting; yes, there are techniques and SKILLs and MCP servers for maximizing usability, and yes, there are right ways to vibe code and wrong ways to vibe code. But it's not hard. At all.
And the last person I want to work with is the expert vibe coder who doesn't know the fundamentals well enough to have coded the same thing by hand.
I noticed that some of these roles come from businesses that recently had layoffs and were now asking their staff to "do more with less" so not exactly places people would be eager to work at, unless they have to.
I don't know if this is the new norm but this craziness is not helped by the increase in the number of "AI influencers" pushing the hype. Unfortunately, I've been seeing this on HN a lot recently.
E.g., Nobody wants to continue working with someone who create sound effects, movie player, operating system, etc.
That's not vibe coding. Imagine if you were hiring a chef and a candidate came in who'd never used a stove. Sure, technically there are other ways to heat food, but it would be a bit odd.
Don’t know/care about coding with AI? You’re unhireable now. Grim.
If someone has been doing that for 10 years and learning nothing, that would be a huge red flag. One that will likely become more common has LLM usage increases.
Everyone talking about vibe coding all your dependencies and the problem is that the people who are good with these tools and do get 50% or greater productivity benefits won’t be able to empathize with the people who are bad with these tools and create all the slop.
I think AI encourages people to take side quests to solve easy problems and not focus on hard problems.
That without domain expertise problems will compound themselves. But I dunno, I agree that they’re here to stay.