The company I work at, like many, has been invaded by a bit of AI psychosis. The pressure to use AI coding agents is high, and with it has come a lot of pressure to experiment and create new shiny things. Lots of applause in the all-hands meeting for the rough-around-the-edges, but coded-in-a-week app, product, or feature.
I’ve taken to calling this “vibe-signaling.” I think it’s a lot like the “virtue-signaling” we saw (and continue to see) in social media. There, we were posting obvious moral truisms to be seen as virtuous. Here, we’re vibe-coding to be seen vibe-coding.
Our company has a concept in our company’s Source Code called “Space, Time.” The idea is that we always make space to dream, to experiment, and to stretch ourselves. Often, we do this through scheduled hack weeks.
It has felt to me like half the company has been on a continuous hack week since February. I worry that in six months, we’re going to look for those promised productivity gains from AI and find only a graveyard of PoCs that were never going to make it into a customer-facing product.
The real productivity gains from AI are “boring” and don’t make for an exciting demo in the all-hands meeting. Paying down tech debt, finding bugs in existing code, debugging test failures, helping me grok new systems much faster: That’s where I’m finding the real gains.