Have you noticed that every cracked vibe coder at large companies is burnt out? Why is that?
Their coworkers aren’t bought into the potential of AI at work and are faced with skepticism. For various valid reasons, workflows remain manual and a lot of the processes remain status quo. Here, AI is not a disrupter but a distractor from ensuring we meet deadlines.
In contrast to the above, you have people who are mid who are creating more work for those who have to clean up after them, and creating mis-trust of AI tools and hardening skeptics. Those who are well-intentioned are met with the real product & engineering costs of integrating their vibe coded idea into production systems.
There’s red tape when it comes to tooling. They all need to dogfood their company’s own AI tools first. This creates a fragmented ecosystem, further widening the chasm between those who are early adopters vs those who are just looking to get started.
Tooling remains a challenge for non-devs, as does AI education. The ones who have the bandwidth will find a way, but the extra overhead and investment to learn isn’t rewarded or prioritized. They want more opportunities to experiment.
Large companies have a ton of context that they’re still figuring out what to do with or how to effectively process with AI tools. Internal developer success teams are overburdened by tackling some of the context engineering challenges, as well security, legal, and other teams that do internal reviews.
They might be looking to leave but the reality is, traditional FAANG companies are moving slower (compared to the speed of AI adoption) so you have to either go where they’re developing frontier models (where everyone is already ahead of the curve) or go to a small-to-mid size company where they’re starting with AI-first principles while also are not disillusioned by what value it can actually provide.
How are companies supporting those early adopters so that they don’t burn out? What lessons can we learn from small-to-mid size companies? i’m in an AI bubble so maybe i’m completely off-base, but what do you think? Are these observations prevalent?
This post was originally on LinkedIn.