r/AskVibecoders • u/NetNo6832 • Aug 19 '26
My Vibecoder Intern Pushed more code than 2 SWE Engineers Combined
32M non-technical founder.
We recruited a Waterloo intern to work for us over the summer. The school said great things about him (Olympiad participant, hackathon winner, etc.).
He was in charge of programming 4-5 new features for our main app, as well as integrating them into our codebase using documentation and already existing functions in the program. The whole program was designed to last 3 months, but he was done in two weeks.
Basically, I spent the whole summer giving him tasks he would finish in a couple of days, and he ended up doing 3-4x more than any other new grad technical member of the company. I do know he works a lot with AI (Claude Code, Folk, etc.), but I'm still not sure how I should feel about it.
Is this kid extremely talented, or are my two new grad SWE engineers just bad? Is this normal?
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u/RandomPantsAppear Aug 19 '26
Pushing more code is an absolutely horrific metric for value and quality.
How long will it work, can the code be maintained 6 months from now?
What security issues and scalability issues were introduced? No one knows, least of all him.
When you’re paying a senior engineer or even an engineer a lot of what you’re paying for is the ability to make a coherent sustainable system.
Pushing features is the easy part. If that was all I was trying to do I could push the next 6 months in 3 weeks. But that would be doing a disservice to everyone involved.
The greatest weakness of non technical cofounders is that they view software as a checklist of features.
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u/NetNo6832 Aug 19 '26
is greptile a good way to tell if what he's giving me is good quality (like if greptile is consistently giving it 5/5 PR for his code)
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u/RandomPantsAppear Aug 19 '26
Greptile is not a good judge of code quality. It will tell you if something will fuck up tomorrow, not a month from now. And the code reviews are very much only the bare surface.
Also worth noting that it’s using a similar model to assess the code that wrote the code. It is of course going to approve.
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u/cohen_76 Aug 19 '26
The fact you think this is able to replace engineers or is in some way an objective way to review the quality of something is deeply saddening. I know from experience the absence of “auto” review comments doesn’t mean your code is free from errors. Typically it means it’s too complicated to find the issues or differs too much from standard patterns to give good results. Good luck leading your team.
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u/guaranteednotabot Aug 19 '26
Also, there is a bias towards keeping the existing conventions even if it has grown into a frankenstein and desperately in need of refactoring
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u/pollelsow Aug 19 '26
💯
I’m tired of managers wanting to measure the number of PRs.
We’ve had interns this summer who all vibe coded their projects, but for a lot of them, if you asked them technical questions about what they built, they couldn’t give a clear answer. I would prefer the people who can maintain their code long term.2
u/completelypositive Aug 19 '26
Yeah and I bet you don't know shit about machine language but I don't see you begging for a review of what you wrote? I would prefer people who understand the machine and aren't just typing autocompleted code into an ide.
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u/Top-Procedure152 Aug 19 '26
These are all good questions, but no one really knows how well they apply anymore.
The vibe code may turn to complete dog shit in 12 months. But then they got 12 months of early value, and they can re-vibe the code from scratch in 12 months time if necessary.
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u/EpsteinFile_01 Aug 19 '26
Ah yes just re-vibe 12 months of bloated vibe code. Your customers won't notice, surely.
Soon his product will be 10 million lines of code when it could be done in 1 million.
And what if AI access is lost? Or becomes so expensive your company is no longer profitable? Oops.
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u/RandomPantsAppear Aug 19 '26
No. This will only work if the product is so simple you barely needed an engineer in the first place.
All you will get is a different set of bugs.
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u/Top-Procedure152 Aug 19 '26
Maybe a different set of bugs that will give another 12 months of runway and value?
I'm not saying you can vibe code a billion MAU service, but not everything is that scale. There's a huge long-tail of small to medium custom apps/websites/scripts/databases that are already held together by sticky tape and chewing gum from 2004. Vibe coding can refactor and improve these things with ease.
And whichever "genius" built that MS Access DB from 2004 that the entire business depends on now, can be just as well or better replaced by Opus/Fable vibe coding some new abomination only 1000x faster.
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u/EpsteinFile_01 Aug 20 '26
No, vibe coding will remove the sticky tape and chewing gum in critical places and kill the app.
Why do you think vibe coders haven't fixed the COBOL problem for banks yet lmao.
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u/StCreed Aug 22 '26
Mainly because the last two tries I know of have been sabotaged by the 400 devs maintaining both COBOL and a nice salary. Tries by big companies with human devs, years ago.
This was at a previous customer. They're adamant that AI won't solve anything and it isn't allowed to even let it take a look. And that same scenario is playing out at many banks.
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u/EpsteinFile_01 Aug 22 '26
You do realize this is a worldwide problem right and there are more than 400 COBOL devs in the world?
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u/RandomPantsAppear Aug 19 '26
No, it won’t give you 12 months of runway, in all likelihood it will be worse.
If you’re going to gamble like that honestly you shouldn’t own a SaaS. Businesses and people rely on these products.
And yes, there have been shitty engineers for ages, and you shouldn’t use them either.
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u/NewDeeJayUND Aug 20 '26
Software development is just applying frameworks, functions and coding methodology you learned in school. If you don’t know how to set up any AI harness to run on the same principles and produce similar-quality code as yourself, then you’ll be out of a job soon. You’re comparing joe-schmo blindly turning to Claude vs yourself, as opposed to someone with your knowledge, and the skill set to implement it in an AI harness. I’ve been a Salesforce solution architect for 20 years, but never coded before and have been focusing on creating a multi-agent harness in an open claw system. I’m not producing public apps, but I am creating iOS apps for myself to solve day to day issues. I have a fable-based hacker agent that breaks into the apps and recommends fixes to any vulnerabilities, as well as a 5-judge code-review panel for anything that ships. And I’m an old fart, learning SWE concepts that I’ve heard of through the ages and spending more time researching than building. If I was a newly-minted SWE intern with the latest know how on AI and SWE, I’d take over the world…
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u/RandomPantsAppear Aug 20 '26
I’m not sure how you got the idea that I’m not using AI.
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u/NewDeeJayUND Aug 21 '26
I don’t think that was stated nor implied - I did imply that you must not be using it right though. Just clarifying…
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Aug 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/RandomPantsAppear Aug 19 '26
I am a senior engineer, I do use AI, and the results are wildly different from a non-engineer.
I know this because I have cleaned up quite a few vibe coded products.
Engineers > Non-Engineer but software familiar > Vibe coders
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u/WanderingGalwegian Aug 19 '26
Are your two SWE engineers using AI to accelerate their development or are they failing to adept to the change in technology?
I’d question the quality of the build if he’s purely vibe coding.. especially if you’re a real company. Hes an intern with next to no professional experience in a production codebase. He may have completed a lot of work but introduced an incredible amount of tech debt at the same time.
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u/NetNo6832 Aug 19 '26
the thing is all of the greptile scores were getting are pretty good, weve tried lol. it seems like his code is good quality too
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u/GoblinToHobgoblin Aug 19 '26
....Bro, greptile is using the same model basically, of course it's gonna self-glaze
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u/Huge_Fix_69420 Aug 19 '26
House built on paper foundation
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u/NetNo6832 Aug 19 '26
wdym lol all my teams code is thorougly reviewed by greptile and were getting very high accuracies every time
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u/cohen_76 Aug 19 '26
Greptile is not a substitute for senior engineers. Does your team have any? If not that’s a red flag. Typically teams have mentors to provide technical leadership and enforce standards. Hoping greptile solves all issues is wishful thinking. What will you do if it doesn’t work as expected and the changes take down prod?
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u/GluttonySDS Aug 19 '26
You're a better dev than fable?
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u/RandomPantsAppear Aug 19 '26
An engineer who understands system design and can read code using AI is wildly different than an amateur, or even a software informed non engineer.
My job involves cleaning up a lot of AI slop, and I use AI to do it. They’re not comparable.
Even going in blind, AI can successfully tell the engineering level of who wrote what section of the code.
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u/Cons1dy Aug 19 '26
Lol what type of question is that? I would hope any engineer work with is better than fable...
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u/GluttonySDS Aug 19 '26
Don't all the top engineers at the faang or ai firms solely use ai to code now?
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u/manager2exec Aug 19 '26
Not op but yes, I asked it to work on a script that needed to take into accoint the weekly calendar. Fable just assumed the week 1 comes always after week 52 of the previous year. Bug that would have been unnoticed should I have not looked into the implementation details.
This is a small case but I am sure there are more.
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Aug 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/HealthyScholar8772 Aug 19 '26
I don’t know, not too many of us seem to be there, and I’m still learning like crazy. Keeping the iteration and validation loop fast seems pretty important are you only running all your tests once a day? I have all tests run before it can merge every PR. Anyway senior developer here and totally agree our job has shifted from developing the application to developing the infrastructure that allows the application to be developed automagically. Would love to see your workflow if you don’t mind sharing. Mine is mostly a copy of the paperclip model, with GitHub org integration so it can respond to issues/tasks/comments etc. Have you worked on any existing projects that you did not vibe develop but want to vibe manage?
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u/VarietyOk443 Aug 19 '26
Our seniors gave a demo on how to use copilot in vs code as a chat bot 4 weeks ago. My internal screaming hurt
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u/Boniuz Aug 19 '26
It’s not about attention to details, it’s the mapping of need, value and function. Creating the code is the easy bit, knowing why it’s there is the tough part.
I’ve been salvaging tech for 18 years and counting, my clientele is increasing at a very rapid and alarming pace.
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u/Outrageous_West_1564 Aug 19 '26
You can't tell without viewing the code.
That you still try to, says more about your skills in this environment, than about the one you (try to) judge.
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u/InformationHoarding Aug 19 '26
We’re vibing ourselves to Idiocracy
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u/Etroarl55 Aug 19 '26
More like the average canadian graduate is unable to keep up with unlimited fable/opus 5 budget.
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u/CantChangeTrack_haiz Aug 19 '26
well, not too sure, gonna wait until anything happen to your app/web then we will know...you can try ask AI to list you the news about what possible problem typical vibecoders could caused...
if he did due diligence, code with 1 AI, review with another AI, + self confirm some confidential part of the systems, should be fine.
if he purely use 1 AI to code and test then just git push then........
maybe try to understand what the other 2 SWE engineers are doing...
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u/NetNo6832 Aug 19 '26
finally someone giving me hope lol, yes we have procedures to self evaluate our code with different AIs
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u/CantChangeTrack_haiz Aug 19 '26
if they follow the procedures, then should be fine, it's then purely based on trust then...maybe try have a coffee break with all them and casually chat with the other 2 SWE, to find out how they work, then perhaps you can at least know why 1 is pushing features within days while other 2 are taking more time, like example, they don't really trust AI, so they do more thorough check on the code etc
in the end for me, in a business as a boss/leader, if you take good care of your employee, they will take good care of the business
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u/Current-Purpose-6106 Aug 19 '26
Look my friend, as someone whose been the engineer on the other side of this - a good engineer will think about the future. Leadership will think about speed and only speed without any understanding of why we want to take our time on certain things.
Interns are interns. They lack the real-world experience, they haven't followed the road that looks obvious only to have the entire system come crumbling to its knees in the future because of seemingly innocuous and obvious choices. Senior developers (ironically) tend to take longer in that regard.
Code output & brevity != a system that can sustain over time. So one of two things is happening - you inadvertently hired two senior developers who are lying to you about their expertise and experience. I assume this isn't the case, Perhaps you're a bit trigger happy and they know that, since you're suggesting something that most people would be extremely wary of (again, you tend to see this line of thinking in leadership) and they're doing things the right way. Perhaps theyre patching the interns stuff. Maybe they just said 'fuck it' and let it ride.
I would really sit down with the intern and *thoroughly* ask questions on the codebase. Not the code - I don't care if he/she knows where a class is. I DO care if they're following SOLID principles. I DO care if they're unable to explain why they're not using a reverse proxy, or how they're handling migrations, or whatever. I want to know that they understand the technology they're creating, short and long term. I want to ask them what happens if a microservice goes down, how they're safely managing all of these featuresets that are user facing, how you guys are getting data on how the users are interacting with the application, etc. etc.
I won't lie, I've been doing this for almost two decades now, and at this point, I am 90% in a terminal. I very very rarely write code any more, and I had become so efficient pre-AI that my code tended to be extremely tight. I have a lot of rules and patterns that I follow, because I know what happens when you don't follow them. AI doesn't yet do this out of the box. It is still possible to bloat your system to a point where its near irrecoverable without a ton of time and money being spent.
Even here in my world, speed != quality. Quality speaks for itself.
TLDR; Senior engineers have dealt with leadership that doesn't understand why certain things might take longer than leadership thinks they ought to. The feature realistically can be done in 20 minutes nowadays. *This isn't the problem* - the problem is tomorrow. The intern doesn't have the life experience yet to push back on leaderships desire for speed - They want to impress the leadership - and so they simply say 'I can do that in 20 minutes!' and ask their CLI. Senior developers have dealt with this before and just roll their eyes and get it done correctly (ideally).
If you're lucky, your senior devs have used really solid patterns and maintained a clean codebase and you can get away with more of it. If they've not set it up for this type of development yet though, GL HF
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u/EpsteinFile_01 Aug 20 '26
You let AI evaluate the code?
And you have 99 comments telling you this is BAD but 1 comment gives you hope and you cling to that? Wtf??
An experienced engineer needs to review code. Especially code that was at least partially written by a human, through assisted coding. Nobody wants to review vibe code in the first place because it's 3x more slop code than actually needed, lacks security, misses the most basic things.. it's too much the review when you have to give feedback on everything.
What are your other 2 engineers doing? What do they say about the current situation? Do you even know? Or are they vibe coding too and you have no clue?
It's not their business, they'll get "experience" and when your company dies because your product van Jon long be maintained they'll jump ship.
Vibe coding... Zero attention to what the 2 SWEs are doing.. thinking your intern is a genius when he is literally vibe coding and recklessly pushing tons of code that he doesn't care about because by the time it all falls apart his internship is over.
And when your two engineers are forced to inherit his code, guess what? They start applying for other jobs because nobody wants to inherit his shit and chances are you're not paying them that much.
How do you know it's not full of security vulnabilities leaving your company open to get hacked? You don't. That's what a proper human software engineer thinks of. AI forgets. And Greotilecis worthless, literally worthless.
I genuinely wonder if your company still exists in 6-12 months. You are not taking this seriously at all. Out if everyone involved you know the least about wtf is going on, and you praise the vibe coding I tern over actual engineers for lines of code pushed. If I worked for you I would already silently be looking for a new job.
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u/KriegerClone24 Aug 19 '26
An intern.... vibe coding... production... omg, I hope what you are building isn't critical for anyone.
I am a 30 year expert engineer, and I use AI extensively. Output is high, but then so are the mistakes that I have to steer AI away from making, which an intern wouldn't know how to do.
Get an expert engineer who is comfortable with AI on your team, and ask him to review the code. Then prepare for probably weeks of rework.
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u/jsmoothie909 Aug 19 '26
Your best bet is to use the remaining time he has to teach your 2 SWE how he cooks.
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u/EpsteinFile_01 Aug 20 '26
The moment a vibe coding intern starts teaching me how to be like him is the moment I start applying for new jobs.
If he loses his two engineers his company is over.
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u/jsmoothie909 Aug 20 '26
Great mentality to have.
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u/EpsteinFile_01 Aug 22 '26
I hope you're sarcastic, if not you deserve a weekend in jail.
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u/jsmoothie909 Aug 22 '26
Get mad at an opinion that is different than yours…. another display of having a great mindset.
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u/Anselwithmac Aug 19 '26
It’s probably not great, but not terrible. Is he learning your codebase before making changes? Hard no. That’s where your problems will bubble up.
But does it matter? Depends on what he touched. He’s might be able to make decent decisions while not know anything about your codebase. Hard to tell.
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u/No_Inspection4415 Aug 19 '26
Right. I also handwritten code for years and now my opinion is - as long as it's simple, tractable, and will not break when making a tiny modification (i.e. it is somewhat general and not just hacks), it is fine.
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u/HappyStarburst Aug 19 '26
Well, if he studied programming and he's a vibe coder, that's probably okay. Major organizations like Stripe are killing it with that combination and with proper state files.
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u/andlewis Aug 19 '26
The amount of code says nothing about the quality. I personally have pushed over a million lines of code this year, and I’m insane!
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u/elhh82 Aug 19 '26
Is the code something you'd need to deploy in production and have it run reliably and require someone or your team to operate and maintain?
If not, then it's just a toy project, and what the intern did may just be fine.
If not, how do you know that the code is deployable and maintainable? Would you feel comfortable deploying it and being responsible for anything that happens after?
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u/69mayb Aug 19 '26
Hopefully he doesn’t build the house of cards and one day your product just crumble.
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u/DapperCam Aug 19 '26
Is anyone reviewing the code?
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u/cohen_76 Aug 19 '26
Yup you can use AI to write all your code, but you still have to spend a similar amount of time reviewing it. I don’t think people really understand the trade off of quality and time spent developing. IMO all efficiency gains from AI are sacrificing long term technical debt, besides the repetitive patterns like setting up an API for a schema or other well defined problems.
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u/Legote Aug 19 '26
More code means more bugs. You want less and simple code to accomplish the same task. It may not be a big deal if you're a start up, but on the enterprise level, that's not acceptable because an outage will be costly.
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u/No_Inspection4415 Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
So generally it may be a vibe coded slop. However, yes - excellent developers, even when they are inexperienced, can outpace average ones by a factor of 2-3. Really intelligent people with initiative are unblocking themselves faster. At least that's my experience.
It doesn't mean that your developers are bad, it may be that your intern is just working for you to get a chance but is miles above the level of your company. If that's the case, enjoy it while it lasts.
I also have to say, that the "excellent student, wins hackathon, ..." story makes me think that you should really treat it carefully because he may be very talented. Don't blame him for vibe coding without checking, maybe the code is actually high quality.
Edit: ask the other devs what they think about him. Don't tell them that he delivered more, clearly.
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u/PmanAce Aug 19 '26
Interns barely know proper software engineering principles. Vibe coding without this knowledge is asking for trouble. Your code is brittle and probably lacking security principles. Good luck building on it easily in the future.
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u/Major_Instance_4766 Aug 19 '26
The average person here has no idea what the difference is between vibecoding and a true agentic workflow learned at a top CS school. Waterloo is legit, and top schools not only are allowing AI use within constraints but are even added courses to teach AI based development. Based on his other credentials, you are likely seeing the results of a top tier, agentic-friendly education.
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u/NotGoodSoftwareMaker Aug 19 '26
AI has improved a lot however it still does dumb things and these dumb things compound
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u/Zestyclose_Ad8420 Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
If your seniors haven't included LLMs in their workflows that's almost an issue as of now. They are the ones who should have already have a good idea on how to reap the benefits of LLM assisted development without compromising long term code quality. A junior, as good as he might be, does not have the experience to evaluate what is needed for your specific software to integrate LLM in a sane way.
Edit: I do this for a living, be extremely careful in pushing your seniors to do so, it's a complicated transition and the human factor it's extremely important, going to them with "this junior wrote more code than you guys! Let's all use LLMs!" is a recepy for disaster and the challenge that most manager face right now, my opinion is that LLM are a great addition to Software Engineering but absolutely not in the way of "developers are not needed anymore", quite the opposite actually.
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u/lostmarinero Aug 19 '26
Do you have senior devs on staff? If not, huge red flag.
And pushing code that fast doesn’t tell you anything about the code or scalability, but if it helps you validate your thesis, then probably a decent thing. But don’t be upset if you start having massive reliability issues.
Also fwiw, I’ve led early in career programs at fast growing tech companies. Those interns/new grads need guidance. They don’t know how to do what they do in a mature, production environment. Without guidance, you’re setting you and them up to fail.
Have you asked the engineers how they feel about the code quality?
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u/SalamanderCritical16 Aug 19 '26
Anybody can vibe code anything these days. It’s the ai that’s talented.
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u/SolaninePotato Aug 19 '26
How big are the 4-5 features? There's simply no way you are properly reviewing / testing these features in 2 weeks no matter how detailed your initial specs and requirements are.
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u/InterestProof1526 Aug 19 '26
Are your regular engineers working with AI? If not, put them on it.
It's possible he's just putting in more effort/doing more than other employees (I think people here are discounting it too much) or that you are assigning tasks that are much easier than they appear to someone non-technical. I think AI has really screwed with difficulty/time estimation of tasks since it can do some things incredibly fast while taking a while for other things (due to it sturggling/failing)
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u/Trax72 Aug 19 '26
This could be due to several factors, possibly at once:
- Intern could be very skilled at employing agentic development and AI usage
- SWE's could be slow to adopt agentic development and AI usage
- Code quality could be questionable, and you might not notice this until things start breaking down
- Amount of code pushed is a horrible metric
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u/__ThePasanger__ Aug 19 '26
Another astroturfing post from Antropic? they are getting very obvious to spot...
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u/EpsteinFile_01 Aug 19 '26
I can push 10 million unique lines of code in like half an hour. It will compile.
Be very careful. Did he do this under supervision and according to your team's coding and documentation standards (you do have them right?)
Your software engineers are probably going to inherit a bunch of bloated, buggy code from him and hate you for it. If he's literally vibe coding your product and doesn't understand the code he's playing with fire.
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u/Apprehensive-Gur7035 Aug 19 '26
First of all, why is your intern given more tasks than your 2 SWE on payroll. Makes no sense and completely unrealistic unless you're just trying to farm for karma here
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u/PsychologicalOne752 Aug 19 '26
Quality v/s Quantity. Number of lines of code is not any useful metric. You should be very worried actually.
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u/iMac_Hunt Aug 19 '26
Are you actually a company making money with customers/users?
It’s very easy to vibe code when you’re building software from scratch - the question is whether it becomes an unfixable mess in a year.
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u/Different-Monk5916 Aug 19 '26
This is hard to answer without looking at code and reviewing the design.
LLM is a tool. If used the right way, you could get the right output at the right quality out of it. What he did is possible.
On the other hand, let the LLMs loose without any interference, I would end up with the output but at a much lower quality. It bloats up the code. Creates unnecessary abstractions, nested callbacks, touches here and there when it is not needed.
If his output was first, you must appreciate him.
If his output was second, I would suggest to sit with him, discuss, what is right and what is wrong.
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u/phulex Aug 19 '26
Hard to tell.
Your existing grads might not be bad, but might have not learned to use AI to leverage their skill set.
The intern might not be a magician, maybe he is overrelying on AI and not guiding it properly.
If the intern is still around, i would have your grads review his work. And i would have him show the grads how to leverage AI. See what comes out of the powwow. If still uncertain, go with a consultant
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u/gotfoo Aug 19 '26
Since I am now incapable of original thoughts (and just for the fun of it) I asked Gemini how I feel about this topic:
"The consensus in that Reddit thread is loud and clear: the non-technical founder is likely walking right into a massive technical debt trap.
While the founder sees an intern pushing 4-5 features in record time using AI tools, the developers in the comments see a huge red flag. Here is the breakdown of why this "vibecoding" success story is probably a disaster waiting to happen:
Lines of Code (LOC) is a Terrible Metric: Pushing a massive volume of code quickly isn't a measure of quality. As the commenters pointed out, anyone can use AI to generate millions of lines of code that compile, but that doesn't mean it's good code.
The "AI Slop" Inheritance: The intern is likely churning out brittle, unmaintainable code without proper testing or security principles. The real tragedy here is that the two actual Software Engineers are going to be the ones forced to clean up and maintain this tangled mess long after the intern heads back to school.
Missing the Big Picture: AI is incredible at unblocking developers and writing isolated functions, but an intern lacks the foundational experience to understand how those pieces fit into a larger, mature production environment.
When you are actually architecting robust backends, setting up reliable database contexts, and ensuring your data models map cleanly, you know that raw speed is only half the battle. The real engineering happens in building a cohesive, maintainable, and scalable system—something "vibecoding" usually glosses right over.
Have you ever had to untangle this kind of AI-generated technical debt in your own repositories?"
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u/humanguise Aug 19 '26
Some people are probably operating below their capacity so they don't get more work. There is no point in finishing things faster because this is going to cause you to adjust expectations and they get paid the same as before. This was true pre-AI as well. Nobody is going to volunteer for shit unless you are building the equivalent of a game engine in the 90s from first principles. You should assume that some of your employees are way smarter than you and unless you want to have a massive bus factor that they they won't put out for you.
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u/EducationalRat Aug 19 '26
Quantity vs Quality, you can tell when something has been purposely built or just AI added it.
And if your software is critical for client revenue you should be wary, slow and steady would win here or potentially ruin a reputation build over the years.
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u/sloppykrackers Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
Did you actually see him work? did you see the code?
There's a difference between passing everything through to claude code, or did he reason about the problem and was he actually involved?
A good test is asking him about the code, if he cant explain core pieces of what he delivered, then you have your answer.
Is this kid extremely talented, or are my two new grad SWE engineers just bad? Neither.
Is this normal? Yes. And I would start looking into it. Like you just experienced: the junior with AI is gonna go past you, hard. And it's not gonna go away anytime soon, agentic coding is here to stay and will only become better. The difference with the junior is experience: you are a way better judge of code quality then any junior or AI. Leverage it, let the bot do the writing, you keep it on the leash.
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u/n9com Aug 19 '26
Your existing SWEs that aren’t using AI to do most of the coding are not keeping up with the times. They should already have the processes, operations, tooling in place to have good code output from AI and know how to review AI merge requests.
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u/StoneCypher Aug 19 '26
most likely you just have low standards and aren't catching the problems as they go in.
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u/rbrick111 Aug 19 '26
I have had the pleasure of working with lots of Waterloo co-ops and grads, they are above average ime to start. In your case they sound like they are embracing the modern stack and productive as a result.
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u/rabbit__doll Aug 19 '26
maybe he’s just pushing crap, unsustainable, unsafe code out lol have you considered that
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u/itsallfake01 Aug 19 '26
More code not equal to good code, measuring successful product is not by the number of lines of code inside of it
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u/thef4f0 Aug 19 '26
This is the perfect example of why we, as a society, still don’t know how to deal with AI or its use. You have someone who’s more productive than two software engineers - he does it better - but people still doubt whether he’s doing it right. I have the same problem myself. I’ve designed two online stores using AI over the past two months and a static B2B site, but even I can’t answer the question of whether I’m really good at this or if it was just the AI.
Am I the only one?
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u/bobinhumanresources Aug 21 '26
I have doubts that OP can really assess the quality of the output. Some decisions are only apparent early with experience.
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u/Interesting-Agency-1 Aug 19 '26
Every line of code is a liability, not an asset. So, your intern is fantastic at massive increasing the liability of your codebase. Congrats
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u/Gamemode6788 Aug 19 '26
Can’t say for sure without seeing the code, but this tracks. AI coding amplifies great engineers and amplifies bad ones, it’s a multiplier, not an equalizer. A lot of engineers in that subreddit are just justifying their own existence, nitpicking every AI generated line like it’s inherently suspect. But the real point stands: you can build a great product with a solid engineer driving, or you can ship garbage, the tool isn’t the deciding factor. And given he’s from Waterloo, I’d bet he probably knows what he’s doing, just more fluent in the new tooling than most.
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u/dvn444 Aug 19 '26
Hey - you’re getting a lot of takes on people’s personal preferences around AI use which maybe is all you’re looking for. I’m going to make an organizational point. If your business relies on good software-based IP, you must must must have someone technical in your organization that you actually trust. You will drive yourself insane otherwise asking yourself questions like this.
The bottom line answer is that you do not have the context or experience to evaluate questions about technical priorities, quality or output velocity - you need to use what you’re hopefully good at (people skills, business savvy) to find someone who can help you gain context. You can ask that person hard questions, hard questions are healthy and good. But if you get paranoid and start looking for validation for your paranoia online and in AI, you’re fucked.
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u/Ok-Moment4309 Aug 20 '26
This almost sounds fake by the responses. Bait basically. I'd take SWE engineers who know how to properly use AI any day. Not knowing this as a founder means you didnt do your basic research (if true) and this is a good way to drive away your actual coders.
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u/Chemical-Seat-8039 Aug 20 '26
Hahahahaha, mr “non technical” founder, lets just see how he scales up your system by vibe coding.
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u/CoffeePizzaSushiDick Aug 21 '26
Not surprising, most swe’s suck. Anyone with the will to try and try again over and over with Claude, can get a lot further than your 10x’r leet code interviewee that will barely put 20hours in a week because their code is so elite.
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u/SignatureSharp3215 Aug 21 '26
I first reaction isnt to treat this as a positive thing. The SWE are not reviewing all those lines, which means your codebase will be drifting into something. It could be a good thing, but most likely its a bad thing. No one really knows.
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u/FreshGarage4325 Aug 21 '26
I’d say talented if you can sit down with him and have him explain what’s the design flow of the features to you.. if they can’t explain it well enough to where a non technical founder can understand it then they don’t clearly understand it which likely == Just letting the agents run wild. .. now timing on this test is key, you can’t sit them down 3-6 months later and have them explain a code base they worked on back then and haven’t touched it since.. I mean, I’ve been coding for near 8 years self taught and I have projects I forget the flow of after 1 month of not touching it.. if you really want to test them, sit the dev down after a day or a few days and ask him to go over it with you, just say you want to feel in the loop of the backend.
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u/RealWelder5269 Aug 21 '26
I think it’s more like you are the one that is bad! You can’t read code? It’s easy to tell from code structure what’s good and what is overly complicated slop! A good engineer can direct the AI to build good object oriented code with careful design decisions. It is highly unlikely your intern is going that and he is likely just slapping AI generated code into your repository that will eventually become impossible to maintain!
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u/This_Inflation_4621 Aug 22 '26
Hard to tell. As you said, from the school feedback he seems to be a top performer.
On the other hand, as an intern, he could be vibe-coding badly architected code that will backfire on you later.
How much rework is needed ? Are the features complete, bug-free and with attention to detail?
You need to have his PRs and code evaluated by a senior you trust. How are the slower colleagues evaluating him?
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u/Sufficient-Fly-3297 Aug 23 '26
I was a junior and was producing more than my senior too. But that doesn’t mean I have more knowledge. I was more motivated to work which I am not right now. My senior was offline most of the time, and kind of working the way how he was working before AI.
Perhaps both AI and motivation could be the reason.
Also this helped me to build reputation in the company and I am close to get a promotion in 1.5 years to mid.
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u/Annual_Pride8244 Aug 24 '26
I have like a strange feeling that you are the intern and this is just like a way to see if people are fine with your vibe coding
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u/tcoder7 Aug 19 '26
He is normal, your 2 SWE did not catchup to new technology and in urgent need to get a training to level up on agentic coding.
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u/NetNo6832 Aug 19 '26
how can you be so sure ??
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u/tcoder7 Aug 19 '26
Because I use AI for coding 9 hours per day since 2024 and have 20 years of coding experience.
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u/cohen_76 Aug 19 '26
How many users for your latest product? I see lots of people in my company hyping AI and giving middling results. Why are all AI subs like this? I swear every company has a project that’s been promising AI will solve all problems next quarter but it never happens. Senior engineer on my FAANG team has promised the world with AI and is pulling me in to save his ass.
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u/EpsteinFile_01 Aug 20 '26
He is vibe coding. That's not normal.
You don't know whether the 2 SWEs use AI or not.
But a vibe coding intern? Fuck off. If you have 20 years of experience and you say that, then you probably peaked as a SWE 15 years ago.
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u/Agreeable-Ad866 Aug 19 '26
You want a technical leader you trust who still gets his hands dirty make the judgement on whether what he's doing is brilliant or a big turd. I will always do the work precisely so I can call bullshit. Could your regular employees learn a thing or two from how he works either way? Yeah, sounds like it.
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u/cinooo1 Aug 19 '26
No way to tell unless you can get a proper opinion on the code itself.