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They Vibe Code

So, you found out that at least one person is “Vibe Coding” – typing poorly designed prompts into AI until they get things working. Probably the poor junior who grew up with it. How do you approach this? Whether you’re just a junior dev or higher up in the food chain, lets go through some strategic approaches.

1. Start the conversation

Everything starts with a conversation. That’s how I got married, had a kid, and got into development. Now the question is who you should start this conversation with and how.

• Approach Decision Makers
  • You’re going to want to approach anyone that can make an impact, even if it’s just your direct line manager, probably better that way. We need people like you – to stand against “vibe coding” and get things done the right way!
• Express your concern
  • It’s as simple as saying “Hi [Manager], do you mind if we have a 5-15 min catch up, later? I have some concerns I would like to address”. I know you’re excited, but take things slowly and professionally. No one wants a guy running around who just discovered Prompting to expect everything to happen overnight. This shows you have initiative and you care about the company. Good.
• Explicitly state your concern. And a solution
  • Programmers are logical, and they’re smart. So just say what you mean and mean what you say. “Hi, I have concerns about the use of AI in the company and would like to present a potential solution – Prompt Engineering”. Approach with the problem, then with a solution. Everyone loves solutions.
• Follow up and Follow Through
  • If you don’t notice any changes, hear nothing back for a while, it’s time to follow up. Cultural change is hard, so be consistent, considerate and approach key players in decision / cultural making if you want to take it further. If not, be happy you tried.

2. Defining Prompt Engineering

Before you do anything rash, it’s probably a good idea to understand and become knowledgeable about what prompt engineering is. It’s a new field and at the time of writing this, I’m not even sure what it is. But I can tell you what it’s not:

• Blindly letting AI reign on your code
• Unspecific prompts
• Poorly scalable
• Undocumented

Now that you know what it is not, here’s what it should be:

• Scalable
• Precise
• Well documented
• Intentional
• Can be easily refactored
• Context driven

Now for this part, you’re going to want to document it, so you can do the next step *shivers*.

3. Presentation

Yes. That’s correct, presentation. Whether it be webinar, writing a guide, recording a video. You need to propagate the idea through the company. If you’re a CTO or HR or Training this is probably easy. If you’re a junior, well, time to take a deep breath and prepare. You can use a proxy of course, if you don’t want the attention, but remember. This was your idea. Time to spread the word.

4. Reprecussions

So you’re jittery, full of energy and excitement and can’t contain yourself. Well done. This is where peoples perception of you have changed and you’re making an impact – moving away from “vibe coding’ and into a new era of “prompt engineering”. So what next?

5. Implement and Iterate

So you have a guide, some documentation and instructions that people can work off. Great, now it’s like a software project, you need to find out what works for your company / crew and implement changes slowly. Could be live example presentations, more documentation, processes, code review policies. The space is as vast as the imagination.

If you enjoyed this, benefit from it, did it, changed stuff, broke stuff – whatever. Let us know, we love to hear your stories about change. Contact us below! or comment.