Ask HN: Worth leaving position over push to adopt vibe coding?

I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I see it as you having two primary options.

You should stay there, learn the new tech, and see what happens.

If it works better than you expected, then your mind will be changed and you’ll be well positioned for the new economy.

If it turns out how you expect, now you have experience working with this tooling to inform your positions at your next company.

Either way, a few months in that environment will help your career.

It's the same elsewhere. Some places are actually using it as a way to get rid of people 'resistant to change'. It also remains to be seen what technical skills we need 5 years from now. I did memory management and pointers 15 years ago and I can still do them now.

What I'd suggest is adapt to it, find ways to push back. Obviously things like "delete entire unit test file & have claude generate a new one" is a bad idea. I've seen claude "monkey patching" a system so that it returns true to the tests.

This issue is going to pop up in the future. Experiment with it on the company's dime even if you've checked out emotionally. You are still doing your job - improving code quality and making sure things run.

The new approach seems to be doing TDD. One, as an engineer, you'll know when AI is bullshitting you with mocks. Even when mocks are BS, you can still test the thing they're meant to represent. 2) AI spits more code than anyone can review. The red, green, refactor approach is one way to keep them on the rails.

Stay, but actively look for other opportunities. It’s a miserable tech job market right now; hunkering down and continuing to collect a paycheck is something you shouldn’t take for granted.

As others have said, use this opportunity to learn about what works w/ AI based on all the crap that doesn’t. Your C-level execs have given you carte blanche to fuck around, without worrying too much about the immediate-term consequences. If they literally said to delete existing test files & generate new ones using AI, do it! And when shit inevitably goes sideways, you’ll be able to spend more of your salaried time rewriting those tests to probably look & work more like the original tests that you deleted.

And while you’re learning to use AI, you’ll be burning the company’s funny-money on AI usage fees. At some point, they’re gonna realize they don’t have a lot to show for all the money that was thrown away in service of doing what they told employees to do. At which point, they’ll take a more measured & pragmatic approach towards using AI. Do everyone a favor & help them get to that point sooner than later.

I'm a senior engineer with 20+ (oof) years of industry experience. I appreciate that this sucks and you don't want to do it. I wouldn't either. That said, it's a hirer's market out there right now. There will be plenty of people who will be happy to take your position while you're looking for something you prefer.

My opinion is that we're going to have about 5 years of this. Managers and C-suite folks are going to do their absolute darnedest to replace and supplement people with AI tools before they figure out it's not going to work. While I appreciate the differences, I remember seeing this ~6-7 years ago with blockchain at my last role. It'll work itself out. In the mean time, you get to contribute to the situation, instead of simply not being present. It's not going to be fun of course.

I don't think we're ever going back from this. There's an entire generation of new coders, and new managers who are growing up with this stuff. It's part of their experience, and suggesting they not use it is going to be akin to asking if you can use a typewriter instead of a computer with a word processor. Some companies will take longer to adopt, but it's coming...

I'm basically retired now and I'm really glad about the timing - I would not want to be in this field if I were in my 30s, 40s or 50s the way things are going. I think what's happening at your company is happening in lots of companies right now so I don't think you'll be able to jump ship and end up somewhere else where it's not happening. You can hope for a backlash - and it might come. In the meantime, go ahead and vibecode being careful about the areas you do it in - they seem pretty good at coming up with testcases, for example. Maybe don't let your coding agent have full editing permissions. Have it give you suggestions for what it would do in the code and evaluate them closely before letting the edits happen (pushing back when needed).

I know with only 5 years experience this may not be obvious, but this is only the first of many “revolutionary” technologies making everyone around you lose their minds that you’ll have to deal with in your career. Like every other such technology, I recommend that you engage with it, understand it, relate that experience to what your employer does, and be the voice of knowledgeable pragmatism about where to use it. In other words, be an engineer.

If that can’t be done where you are, or isn’t valued, you’re in the wrong place.

I’ve been through this with (including but not limited to) PCs, OOP, client-server, SOA, XML, NoSQL, blockchain, “big data”, and indeed, multiple definitions of “AI”. Turns out all but one of those were actually somewhat useful in the end, when applied properly, but they didn’t eliminate the industry. Just roll with it.

Is it worth leaving? Hard to say for your specific situation, there's thousands of variables that no one here will ever know. Unless you are a superstar or independently wealthy, it's typically a bad idea to leave a job before you have something else lined up.

Is it worth looking? Absolutely! It will be much easier to make a decision when you're comparing your current position to a job offer, rather than comparing your current position to an unknown. I would also add, no matter what you feel about your current job, it's always a good idea to keep feelers out there for new positions. The fastest way up the rank and salary ladders is moving to new positions. It will always outpace internal promotions.

Three years ago I left my job with VERY high salary because I was starting to burn out and took two months off.

From my experience, if you're burnt out or starting to burn out then leave, otherwise I recommend staying until you secure another job.

Regarding the situation, they want to delete the tests? Fine, you have git right? Replace it, and let everything set on fire, quietly enjoy the chaos and at some point revert the changes. Or don't, you're leaving anyway.

Nah.

There's always pointless fads and food fights. Just tough it out. (Until a better gig comes along.)

I wish I could advise my young self "this too shall pass". The savvy play is to be a "team player". All those dumb hills I choose to die on... For dumb crap which eventually self-mooted all by themselves.

There was a comment (or a story?) some time back about how to survive as a software developer when projects are managed by Pointy Haired Bosses (PHBs). From memory:

Always be positive, optimistic.

Never say no or hedge or doubt.

Proactively manage upwards with enthusiastic status reports.

Instead of owning up to failures (due to fantasy estimates, ridiculous deadlines, scope creep, misc chaos, etc), list in detail all the great things and awesome progress you and your fantastic team have miraculously accomplished.

Like "reproducible builds which reduced failures by 1000% FTW, saving 30 hours per week" and "implemented boss' recommended pub/sub heptagonal meta architecture event sourced distributed pseudo sharded hybrid cloud something something, attaining sustained P95 latency of sub 3 picoseconds for 2 days"

Sadly, I was never able to keep up the act for more than 12 months. I'm just too contrarian, sarcastic, jaded. (I used to tell myself that I was "results oriented". I now see I was just an asshole. Everyone lies, needs to suspend disbelief, have a reason to crawl out of bed every morning. Who am I to piddle in their Cheerios?)

I'd like to think that if someone had clubbed young(est) me with the clue stick, I could have adapted.

YMMV. Happy Hunting.

Don't leave your job. Unless you've looked for jobs recently you have no idea how bad the current job market is. You also need to adapt to AI. Obviously, clueless people are going to misuse it. But let them learn the hard way. I've found that in organizations where the higher ups are incompetent if you try to signal the problem you become the problem. Then you're viewed as "being hard to work with" rather than trying to prevent a tragedy. Keep your job lad.

If you do get another offer remember that there's always a risk when you change jobs. I.E. how stable is that companies funding? Will they want to do layoffs, too? Are their investors pressuring them to make cuts? Because if you're a new hire you can say good bye to that job. We don't have formal tenure in tech but there's still a human cost to firing people who have been long-time with a company. The decision makers have less attachment to a new hire so its easier to fire them in that respect (and how many decisions with fires are just arbitrary, number-based, bad luck.)

Vibe coding/prompt engineering automatically accumulate "technical debt" of spaghetti code and thus with time cause every larger project to fail. Sooner or later you will be asked to fix all that AI mess in your company codebase and when you respond that you are unable to do so without a major, manual rewrite, you will probably get fired. Stay at your job for as long as possible, but start searching for a new position ASAP in an organization that declares up front that they do not intend to use AI for their codebase as a matter of company policy. There are actually companies out there already that make that kind of choice, but it might take a year or two for you to find such a job in the current job market. If all else fails, switch to the Linux kernel/driver development specialty with C/Rust for companies like Canonical.

I can't stop thinking what happened when CASE tools, WYSIWIG, UML, Model Driven Architecture/Development, etc was pushed into devs. I know, it's a different phenomenon (that was a graphical visual push, this keeps the text).

I've recently started using Claude Code, and also expected to not like it (based on using Claude Web to generate some code). I have 17 years of experience.

But it's actually been fantastic. It's challenging in a new way: splitting things down into small enough descriptions that the LLM don't go down a rabbit hole it can't get out of. While also giving high-level guidance to plan for the whole project.

I like UI design, but implementing it is tedious and slow. With Claude I can get a dashboard page done in less than 1 min, from a spec, that I can iterate on. Instead I can focus on the parts I care about, like backend. I need to nudge it to always care about security and storage concerns. I've seen O(n²) loops where O(n) would be sufficient. It keeps making enough mistakes that I'm not exactly out of a job.

The best way to use Claude Code is to write those descriptions and use examples of what you want the output to look like, so take it in small steps and do manual corrections.

However, you need to have seen some good code before using it to make something good. It's just a tool, like compilers and IDEs. I'm pretty happy I don't have to input programs using eight data switches and a latch switch on an Altair 80. And I'm now pretty happy I don't have to care so much about internal API boundaries, because doing a refactoring is one sentence away.

However, I do keep running out of quota after 2-2.5h out of 5h. If I had a company sponsoring this, it would be a no-brainer to use it more.

I’d stay and actually try the vibe coding, but if it’s not working, only a bit.

For example, try deleting one failing unit test and re-generate it with Claude. Then if it turns out mostly worthless, scrap it and restore the original test. Maybe the entire test is correct (and easy to verify), maybe you can take pieces from it, maybe it’s unsalvageable; if it doesn’t save time, write tests manually from then on until the next major AI improvement.

Worst case, CEO fires you for not vibe-coding enough. Best case, you find a way for them to make your life easier. My prediction (based on some but not much experience) is that you spend only a small amount of time trying the AI tools, occasionally they impress you, usually they fail, but even then it’s interesting and fun to see what they do.

EDIT: as for dealing with the spaghetti when others use AI; wait for that to become a problem before quitting over it. And of course you can look for opportunities now.

My company’s CIO was pushing AI hard for a while. Annoyingly, he was pushing it while we still got regular emails from the security/legal teams saying we weren’t allowed to use it yet.

We now have access, but that CIO is also gone and we don’t hear about it much anymore. We still have the tools, and a general AI (for use outside of code) is coming, but the blind hype seems to be gone.

Maybe your leadership will shift, or come back to reality in time.

Personally, I think it’s a red flag when leaders jump on hype trains that hard. They’re so desperately trying to avoid missing the boat that they ignore common sense and risk. Not good.

You’re right to be cautious. Relying solely on “vibe coding” and LLM-generated code can accelerate prototyping, but usually at the cost of long-term maintainability and deep technical understanding. If leadership is actively discouraging best practices like manual testing and code review, that is a red flag, especially for a senior engineer invested in quality and growth.

Personally, I had try to have a candid discussion with your CTO/CEO about your concerns and see if there’s room for a more balanced approach. If it’s clear they’re not interested and you start feeling your skills are stagnating, it’s reasonable to look for a company whose engineering values align better with yours.

Ultimately, AI tools are “just tools.”

> The CEO & CTO are both obsessed with it and promote things like "delete entire unit test file & have claude generate a new one" rather than manually address test failures.

So what are the tests actually for then?

Quit.

How can you trust your economic welfare to be in the hands of people that believe in magic?

Yes, but not without something else lined up – it’s tough out there right now. There are absolutely companies out there with much more sensible AI policies. It is good to have experience with it, it’s a tool in the toolbox, but best to be rid of the starry-eyed marks taken in by the hyperbole.

> "delete entire unit test file & have claude generate a new one" rather than manually address test failures.

First thought, "wat", what if the code is broken, not the tests...

Second thought, if the entire unit test file is getting generated by claude without significant oversight like this suggests... I suppose its probably the tests that are broken.

---

As for your own situation. Looking for a new job because you aren't happy with the process at your current job is completely reasonable.

I'm not sure that you're right that this workflow will cause your technical growth to stall though - the freedom to experiment with strange new (probably ineffective) workflows on someone else's dime might well be beneficial in many ways. But if you're not happy doing this, and you have the skills and network to find a new job, why wouldn't you?

A software engineer's job is to design and create programs that adequately meet their need (including performance, reliability, and maintainability). That's your job. Your job is not "type out the code".

If an AI helps you do that (all of it, including the "maintainability" part), then sure, use it. If not, don't (or only use it in limited places where it can help).

How do you know? You almost certainly have to experiment. So look at your company's push as a chance to experiment. But when you do, make sure you have your "software engineer" hat on, not your "code monkey who cranks through Jira tickets" hat.

Play along, but keep relatively detailed yet abstracted notes on how the AI code is failing. Keep these notes private ... type them into a notes program on your personal device so that you can draw upon them in the future if needed.

Your concerns are completely valid - over-relying on AI for everything, especially deleting entire test files instead of debugging, will definitely stunt your technical growth and leave you managing a mess of generated code later. If leadership won’t listen to a balanced approach where AI handles boilerplate but humans handle complex logic and debugging, then it’s probably time to move on. With 5 years of experience, you’re in a good position to find a company that values proper engineering practices while still leveraging AI as a tool rather than a crutch.

The answers to stay until you find something else are correct.

I would also add that it's probably pretty easy to fake it - in my experience management, especially executive level, have no idea how things actually get done.

If they aren't prescribing a very specific workflow, you can create you own/install whatever tooling you want.

It's also worth pointing out - if you really are sufficiently experienced, these tools could prove to be a force multiplier and may actually be worth an investigation. You still have to review code and provide clear specifications in discrete, easily palatable chunks.

Technical growth in 2025 means understanding how to use LLMs effectively more than your peers.

There's no going back to pre-LLM days. Just like we're not going to stop using machines to weave textiles.

Quit. Doing the work you hate will burn you out, faster than you’d expect. The worst part is to pretend to be enthusiastic about the tech, while in the same time knowing it’s just not worth your time. If you don’t have enough savings and leaving the job isn’t an option right now, maybe just stay for several months and learn some tech that is complex and boring enough to not to attract too many ”vibe” people

My workplace has execs saying similar things unfortunately. it's even in some company goals that we will be using it. pretty commonly known company too.

Look for a new job but be amendable to your current one. If they want you to "vibe code" then do it and look for another job on the side. Get in touch with your network and see if anyone is hiring with reasonable coding practices. My company bought everyone a Claude subscription but they trust us to use it where reasonable.

25 years of experience here. AI is the real deal, and it should be the primary way you’re coding now. Everyone who doesn’t embrace it is about to become a dinosaur overnight.

They’re going to pay you to learn to work with the thing you need to learn to work with anyway? Be smart. Take the deal.

That said, it’s a free country, you can quit any time for any reason.

Knowing how to vibe code is a skill, though a lesser one than knowing how to design maintainable enterprise scale code that can be maintained and reused by others.

The vibe coding fad will pass, but building enterprise code and intelligently using AI for some tasks will make you better.

If you are not at least using these tools, more so than vibecoding but understanding how to improve your craft, you are going to lose. I’m now 100% behind AI gen code as it has given me 10x powers. Ask the right prompts, get the best code. AI, if you reject it, yngmi

Truth is for most businesses tech is just a means to an end and not an end to itself.

Yep, your company is pretty much doomed.

CEO can afford being somewhat ignorant about the nature of engineering work or how llms work (still a red flag for a tech company).

But CTO being that stupid (if you don’t exaggerate) leaves little room for doubts.

Jeez, I was still calling myself junior after 5 years. Nice.

So there are companies where forcing vibe coding/LLM stuff is not a thing at all. This is majority of companies by the way. You can easily find one of them.

There isn't enough context to hazard a guess at stay or go.

I would like to call out deleting the unit tests as a very funny way to deal with code generators breaking the product.

You're still responsible for the code you commit. If you turn your codebase into AI-generated spaghetti, that's not the tool's fault

The market is not easy right now. I would not leave unless you have something definite lined up.

> 1. Be pushed into a workflow that will cause my technical growth to stall or degrade

Whether your growth stalls or degrades is up to you, but in my country your employer's ability to tell how you how to produce/deliver the work (not just the outcome desired) is the difference between being an employee and contractor

You should remain open to new things in this industry. Hate it or not, AI is currently the new thing in our line of work.

> 2. Be overseeing a bunch of AI-generated spaghetti 2-3 years from now

How you implement code, including human review and understanding of code, is key. I have never copy and pasted code into development from an LLM/AI helper. I've certainly asked it questions about the code, tested the code output, had it add comments to help me understand the code it wrote and produce alternate methods that better fit my needs, etc.

"No spaghetti" in the codebase will prevent having to take care of it, but that doesn't mean small modular components, troubleshooting, general ideation of different approaches to see what can scale, etc. isn't going to be really helpful.

> I'm a 'senior engineer' with ~5 years of industry experience and am considering moving on from this company

5 years is not what I would consider a big bargaining chip in today's market full of seasoned developers, including those who started when they were in middle school and are applying for the same jobs as you would be.

Can you work with your employer to effectively introduce some AI tools and workflows to help ideas, changes, revisions, new features, or even documentation?

Don't jump until it is safe, and remember the next place is likely just slower or one leadership away from asking their employees the same thing your employer is.

I suspect that if you don't change the /sector/ of computing you are working in, you may run into the same thing elsewhere.

AI is being adopted mainly where it works, and where it works is where regurgitated code cobbed-together from what has been seen before is sufficient to get the job done.

Assume that your CEO and CTO are not complete idiots; that they have some rational argument for believing that the approach will work. It's also possible they are gambling on an experiment; if it fails, they will back off on it.

If you want to avoid being told to use AI, you have to work on legacy tech stacks that AI doesn't understand; algorithmically complex code; critical infrastructure code where one bad bit stops multiple machines and applications; safety-critical embedded where AI slop could maim and kill and so is out of the question, etc.

Side question:

> I'm a 'senior engineer' with ~5 years of industry experience

What is the definition of junior, mid (?) and senior engneer? I've been writing code profesionally for over 20 years, but I'm not sure if I'd call myself an engineer at all, let alone a senior one.

Good luck finding a place that isn't pushing devs to heavily use AI. And even if you find somewhere that's not doing it right now, it may just mean their management is far behind the curve and they will have a similar push soon.

Sane prompt for u my friend: do not generate tech debt.

Theres vibe coding and there’s ai assisted coding. The former is bullshit and causes more problems than it fixes. The latter is great and you should lean into it. There was a post a few days ago about a rule file for using Claude code effectively. (I never bothered to learn the hn rules on linking so google it up with site:)

You should start building a rule file listing every way it screws up and a) warning it not to b) watching for it. Errors I’ve seen: failure to follow best security practices, failure to plan properly, failure to update variable names, lies, bad tests, stuck in a rut flip flopping between two possible paradigms Get into it, get better at it than your CEO and CTO, save them from the worst of their folly.

And simultaneously start looking for another job because you clearly don’t like them and disagree with their strategy in important ways.

AI assisted coding is the future, but probably not the way they’re doing it. But pain is the best teacher so dive in and feel that pain.

Zooming out the problem is micromanaging vs. let those on the shop floor make decisions. You are being told how to work. If everyone but you agrees maybe it is time to consider a move. Your story paints a worldview you have that will be loved by some companies I think.

If it is CTO only and the engineers all disagree. Maybe worth thinking about how to get that voice heard without ruffling feathers.

Try an evaporating cloud! This is a bit heavy to read but is a good technique to think about. It is so good it might change YOUR mind too about this situation! It looks to get to the facts and once practices is a good tool to use.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporating_cloud

Tldr is they want vibe coding because X and you want not vibe coding because of Y. The assumption is Y = !X but if it isn't there could be a good win win.

> delete entire unit test file & have claude generate a new one

Why not just add new tests or refactor the existing ones? Seems kind of silly.

Aside from that:

  - if you don't like AI tools and can afford to do so, then look for a place that matches how you want to work
  - if you do like AI tools, or are open to learning them, then there isn't an issue (aside from maybe how they're used)

There isn't much more to it: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-artisans-and-brainrot (bit of a rant of mine on the topic, the tl;dr would be that the cat is out of the bag in regards to these tools and there are both positives and negatives, but they lead to brainrot and degradation of skills the same way how IDEs and StackOverflow did, just a large leap further)

This AI nonsense has infected every company and everybody is an "AI expert". You can't escape it and you'll be at a competitive disadvantage at another employer when starting from scratch. The thing about this AI fad is that nobody has really figured out where the real utility is to be gained and how to reduce costs from that.

Yeah, you should start looking for a new role immediately.

Suggest they C suite be replaced with vibe managing.

Make fun of their outputs

impressive that you're a senior engineer after only 5 years

No.

Good luck.

Software engineering is not about typing. The LLM would write the unit tests based on the implementation you provide. Regardless of the LLM's output, you'd be expected to read and understand it before committing, or at the very least, review, refactor, tweak, etc. Reading is crucial for both personal and cognitive development. That is not vibe coding! There are top devs in the industry using them in top applications, such as Ghostty or Bun. The biggest names in the scene! The reality is that you would not know if your favourite app was partially or fully built with LLM help, sorry to disappoint!