> But now that most code is written by LLMs
Am I in the Truman show? I don’t think AI has generated even 1% of the code that I run in prod, nor does anyone I respect. Heavily inspired by AI examples, heavily assisted by AI during research sure. Who are these devs that are seeing such great success vibecoding? Vibecoding in prod seems irresponsible at best
> Who are these devs that are seeing such great success vibecoding? Vibecoding in prod seems irresponsible at best
AI written code != vibecoding. I think anyone who believes they are the same is truly in trouble of being left behind as AI assisted development continues to take hold. There's plenty of space between "Claude build me Facebook" and "I write all my code by hand"
I was talking to a product manager a couple weeks ago about this. His response: most managers have been vibecoding for long time. They've just been using engineers instead of LLMs.
If you work on highly repetitive areas like web programming, I can clearly see why they're using LLMs. If you're in a more niche area, then it gets harder to use LLM all the time.
There is a nice medium between full-on vibe coding and doing it yourself by hand. Coding agents can be very effective on established codebases, and nobody is forcing you to push without reviewing.
For the last 2 or 3 months we made a commitment as a team to go all in on claude code, and have been sharing prompts, skills, etc, and documented all of our projects and at this point, claude is writing a _large_ percentage of our code. Probably upwards of 70 or 80%. It's also been updating our jira tickets and github PRs, which is probably even more useful than writing the code.
Our test coverage has improved dramatically, our documentation has gotten better, our pace of development has gone up. There is also a _big_ difference between the quality of the end product between junior and senior devs on the team.
Junior devs tend to be just like "look at this ticket and write the code."
Senior devs are more like: Okay, can you read the ticket, try to explain to to me in your own words, let's refine the description, can you propose a solution -- ugh that's awful, what if we did this instead.
You would think you would not save a lot of time that way, but even spending an _hour_ trying to direct claude to write the code correctly is less than the 5-6 hours it would take to write it yourself for most issues, with more tests and better documentation when you are finished.
When you first start using claude code, it feels like you are spending more time to get worse work out of it, but once you sort of build up the documentation/skills/tools it needs to be successful, it starts to pay dividends. Last week, I didn't open an IDE _once_ and I committed several thousands lines of code across 2 or 3 different internal projects. A lot of that was a major refactor (smaller files, smaller function sizes, making things more DRY) that I had been putting off for months.
Claude itself made a huge list of suggestions, which I knocked back to about 8 or 10, it opened a tracking issue in jira with small, tractable subtasks, then started knocking out one at a time, each of them being a fairly reviewable PR, with lots of test coverage (the tests had been built out over the previous several months of coding with cursor and claude that sort of mandated them to stop them from breaking functionality), etc.
I had a coworker and chatgpt estimate how long the issue would take if they had to do it without AI. The coworker looked at the code base and said "two weeks". Both claude and chat GPT estimate somewhere in the 6-8 weeks range (which I thought was a wild over estimate, even without AI). Claude code knocked the whole thing out in 8 hours.
FAANG here (service oriented arch, distributed systems) and id say probably 20+ percent of code written on my team is by an LLM. it's great for frontends, works well with test generation, or following an existing paradigm.
I think a lot of people wrote it off initially as it was low quality. But gemini 3 pro or sonnet 4.5 saves me a ton of time at work these days.
Perfect? Absolutely not. Good enough for tons of run of the mill boilerplate tasks? Without question.
It's all over the place depending on the person or domain. If you are building a brand new frontend, you can generate quite a lot. If you are working on an existing backend where reliability and quality are critical, it's easier to just do yourself. Maybe having LLMs writing the unit tests on the code you've already verified working.