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Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

I mean the process either works, or it doesn’t. Meaning it either brings in the expected value with acceptable level of defects or it doesn’t.

From a higher up’s perspective what they do is not that different from vibe coding anyway. They pick a direction, provide a high level plan and then see as things take shape, or don’t. If they are unhappy with the progress they shake things up (reorg, firings, hirings, adjusting the terminology about the end goal, making rousing speeches, etc)

They might realise that they bet on the wrong horse when the whole site goes down and nobody inside the company can explain why. Or when the hackers eat their face and there are too many holes to even say which one they did come through. But these things regularly happen already with the current processes too. So it is more of a difference in degree, not kind.

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I agree with this completely. I get the impression that a lot of people here think of software development as a craft, which is great for your own learning and development but not relevant from the company's perspective. It just has to work good enough.

Your point about management being vibe coding is spot on. I have hired people to build something and just had to hope that they built it the way I wanted. I honestly feel like AI is better than most of the outsourced code work I do.

One last piece, if anyone does have trouble getting value out of AI tools, I would encourage you to talk to/guide them like you would a junior team member. Actually "discuss" what you're trying to accomplish, lay out a plan, build your tests, and only then start working on the output. Most examples I see of people trying to get AI to do things fail because of poor communication.

> I get the impression that a lot of people here think of software development as a craft, which is great for your own learning and development but not relevant from the company's perspective. It just has to work good enough.

Building the thing may be the primary objective, but you will eventually have to rework what you've built (dependency changes, requirement changes,...). All the craft is for that day, and whatever that goes against that is called technical debt.

You just need to make some tradeoffs between getting the thing out the faster possible and being able to alter it later. It's a spectrum, but instead of discussing it with the engineers, most executive suites (and their manager) wants to give out edicts from high.

> Building the thing may be the primary objective, but you will eventually have to rework what you've built (dependency changes, requirement changes,...). All the craft is for that day, and whatever that goes against that is called technical debt.

This is so good I just wanted to quote it so it showed up in this thread twice. Very well said.

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