What happens when the senior executive vibecodes?
- What happens when the senior executive vibecodes?
- A senior person flinging codeslop.
- The unlucky reviewer has to clean up the mess while saying, "Yes, sir, LGTM!"
- Instead of pushing back on low-quality or ill-considered code, which could get them told to "act like an owner, let's be bold!" pushback.
- Instead, just land it.
- Then, when the exec isn't looking anymore, quietly clean it up.
- The exec thinks they're being bold and going fast, unlike the peons who are too timid.
- In reality, the exec is making way more of a mess than they realize.
- Also, if the peons had shipped such low-quality code there's a real chance they'd be fired.
- It's the engineers who will get paged when low-quality code blows up, not the exec.
- Even execs who are truly good engineers will think they're better engineers than they are.
- The organization will insulate them from the indirect effects of their mistakes.
- This is less about their ability, and more about their relative power.
- I heard of a story where on an executive retreat the execs vibecoded an update to the marketing pages and shipped it… with hallucinated prices!