10,000 hours vibe coding experience: My reaction to reddit post: "How we vibe code at a FAANG."

Recently there's been a very hot topic on Reddit about coding with AI in production at a big company.

Many people say AI can make mistakes. Yes, that's true. But they only focus on the dark side rather than the bright side. From my own experience, and similar views from AI godfather and Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, the current architecture of large language models are simulators of the human brain.

So you can see AI is just like your colleagues.

Personally, in my company, I use AI for everything: planning, user research, customer support, writing code and blog posts. We also use AI for things you cannot imagine, like reviewing our daily work and code reviews.

I can give you a very concrete example. Apple's App Store reviewers are often crazy about details, randomly giving us rejections for random things. Apple has very random and unstable rules about App Store review guidelines. They can sometimes reject you and sometimes approve even if they have concerns because the reviewer is outsourced, they don't care that much, but they need to prove their value. So how do we as engineers handle random rejections from Apple?

That's pretty easy. It's 100% possible nowadays. Usually they reject due to some random issues like "a microphone button cannot be allowed, it can only be continued," some nonsense like that.

Due to their so-called privacy concerns or maybe the stability of App Store experience, which is nonsense. Currently we have an even better way to handle App Store rejections, which is basically to use AI to fix the issues they mentioned while keeping our app's functionalities. I recently got rejections about Apple sign-in support and some permission request wordings. AI can fix that within 10 minutes and I submit to the App Store for processing within another 10 minutes. So it ends up being hours or days waiting for App Store human review, which is pretty bad, right?

This was actually my life when I was working as a full-time professional at Microsoft because of random things as well. Sometimes it's a very important customer, sometimes the request is from my managers, my VPs, or even the CEO.

You won't believe this: most software job tasks are not that valuable. I think only 10% or even 1% are really valuable, really creative. The other 99% are just trash.

For example, Apple builds their review guidelines like red tape not for anything, just to prove their value of the App Store. I believe the world would be one zillion times better if there was no iOS App Store, if people could install whatever they want on their expensive devices.

So why waste our lives using AI to solve this kind of garbage? Why can't we outsource this kind of thing to AI? Just do it. You don't need anybody's permission to use AI.

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