I was talking to a co-worker today who has been placed in some level of hell. I can’t articulate the exact floor or ring, but it does sound like a place reserved for some pretty horrible people. This co-worker does not deserve this. He is, by all accounts—including mine—smart, well-intentioned, polite, thoughtful, and professional. However, for reasons he’s been consigned to work with a team composed essentially of Vibe Coders.

Seeing as he’s smart, well-intentioned, polite, thoughtful, and professional, this is very unappealing to him and a source of daily misery. I realize a lot of people don’t understand this, but those of us who care about what we build feel legitimate distress and discomfort when cobbling together garbage. It’s offensive. It’s offensive because to people who care, their work and craft is an extension of who and what they are.

Obviously, there are whole swaths of the species that don’t understand this at all. The results of their… work… show.

As we discussed his plight a bit today, I thought about how bad software development has been the entire time I have done it professionally. I know there are solid professionals out there who care about what they do and take it seriously. These are the minority, unfortunately.

I’ve opined in the past that the lack of real consequences is a huge factor in the poor work that’s produced. I think another factor is that software engineering is an industry that believes a new tool is always the answer. AI is, in many respects, the greatest expression of this.

Hate writing code? Documentation? Tests? Planning? Staying awake during meetings? Reading? Thinking? Collaborating? AI’s got you covered buddy! It does it all. The best part? Unlike so many actually useful tools and methodologies, your bosses love this one because they believe it’s more than it is. So does every engineer who is invested the time into playing with these toys.

The worst of it is watching colleagues who do care about their work get consumed by teams and codebases that do not. After all, who wants to be Sisyphus? That’s the trouble of it all really. When cultures embrace garbage, it always wins. I’ll likely give entropy its own very long write up at some point, but for now I’ll just note that it is the greatest, deadliest, and oldest of foes to all makers.

AI is really just magnifying and inflating what’s always been true. Software engineering is an utter cesspool. We’ve always been bad at documentation. We’ve always been bad at clarity. We’ve told ourselves lie after lie after lie about little hacks and “just this once.” We’ve always traded our future for instant gratification.

It’s a discipline—if one can even call it that—that does not take itself particularly seriously. It’s a lot of toys and a bunch of children who lack any sense of mortality or consequence. It’s not on them either because the industry, at least in the corporate sector, is downright hostile to “wasting time” on mentoring or guiding. This entire rotting carcass was always going to be the end result of our corporate masters and their collective greed and ignorance.

With AI, we can just embrace it. Let Claude show the world who you really are. (Don’t worry, I know already.)