Vibe coding for teams, thoughts to date

Summary

I’ve got Claude Code running in the background while I tab between writing this, sipping a Powers, and fielding phone calls from a team slightly panicked about the end of quarter QBR. This blog post is being written on May 27th, 2025, things may have changed by the time you read it. It was a toss up whether to post this on Notes on engineering leadership, or here, but eventually decided this was too loose for even Notes low standards. You’ve been warned (or at least given a context window with which to understand the remaining blog post). LLMs are without a doubt the most disruptive change to how code gets written I’ve seen in my career since the introduction of the World Wide Web. As someone who largely started on the web at a time when most people weren’t, I remember reading Dr. Dobb’s 30 years ago and seeing all these ads for weird C++ binaries I could pay to include in binaries I shipped on CDs. (Jokes on me as I now work at a company that has C++ in production that dates to that era). That said, as of today, LLMs don’t change some key fundamental physics of writing code as a team. Importantly, as of today, they haven’t changed the fundamental calculation that writing code is always easier than understanding code. The insight that reading code is harder than writing leads naturally to the insight that every line of code is tech debt. Every line of code encodes your best current understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve (for increasingly weird definitions of “you”). Nothing has changed the fact that your current understanding is probably limited, and wrong in several ways. Updating your mental model even harder for LLMs than for engineers If you’ve ever had the questionable joy of participating in a “technological transformation” (whether or not it was called that) than you’ve had the specific experience of how challenging it is to convince an engineering team to give up on its current test suite (for extremely variable values of “test suite”). It doesn...