Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

Ah, there it is. Every time I see one of these posts, it's by someone who isn't actually a developer. It's always some gleeful executive type salivating over how much money he thinks this will save him.

I suppose we'll have to suffer a wave of these idiots firing their engineering staff and crashing their companies before they learn their lesson.

And you have to be vigilant, too. You can spend a day or two in full vibe code mode if you really want to ship a bunch of features fast, and they'll all work and it will feel amazing, all while it's secretly shitting all over your codebase, and you won't know it until it's too late. And not in a "oh now you just have to fix it up" way - if you go too long it may be just about as difficult to fix as it would have been to write.

    I'll preface this comment with: I am a recent startup owner (so only dev, which is important) and my entire codebase has been generated via Sonnet (mostly 3.7, now using 4.0). If you actually looked at the work I'm (personally) producing, I guess I'm more of a product-owner/project-manager as I'm really just overseeing the development.

    > I have yet to see an LLM-generated app not collapse under it’s own weight after enough iterations/prompts.

    There's a few crucial steps to make an LLM-generated app maintainable (by the LLM):

    - _have a very, very strong SWE background_; ideally as a "strong" Lead Dev, _this is critical_

    - your entire workflow NEEDS to be centered around LLM-development (or even model-specific):

      - use MCPs wherever possible and make sure they're specifically configured for your project

      - don't write "human" documentation; use rule + reusable prompt files

      - you MUST do this in a *very* granular but specialized way; keep rules/prompts very small (like you would when creating tickets)

      - make sure rules are conditionally applied (using globs); do not auto include anything except your "system rules"

      - use the LLM to generate said prompts and rules; this forces consistency across prompts, very important

      - follow a typical agile workflow (creating epics, tickets, backlogs etc)

      - TESTS TESTS AND MORE TESTS; add automated tools (like linters) EVERYWHERE you can

      - keep your code VERY modular so the LLM can keep a focused context, rules should provide all key context (like the broader architecture); the goal is for your LLM to only need to read or interact with files related to the strict 'current task' scope

      - iterating on code is almost always more difficult than writing it from scratch: provided your code is well architected, no single rewrite should be larger than a regular ticket (if the ticket is too large then it needs to be split up)

    This is off the top of my head so it's pretty broad/messy but I can expand on my points.

    LLM-coding requires a complete overhaul of your workflow so it is tailored specifically to an LLM, not a human, but this is also a massive learning curve (that take's a lot of time to figure out and optimize). Would I bother doing this if I were still working on a team? Probably not, I don't think it would've saved me much time in a "regular" codebase. As a single developer at a startup? This is the only way I've been able to get "other startup-y" work done while also progressing the codebase - the value of being able to do multiple things at a time, let the LLM and intermittently review the output while you get to work on other things.

    The biggest tip I can give: LLMs struggle at "coding like a human" and are much better at "bad-practice" workflows (e.g. throwing away large parts of code in favour of a total rewrite) - let the LLM lead the development process, with the rules/prompts as guardrails, and try stay out of it's way while it works (instead of saying "hey X thing didn't work, go fix that now") - hold its hand but let it experiment before jumping in.