Yea it's vibe/agentic coding. That's what about half of the current jobs are right now. It's really sad. Saw a vibe coder job today, 20bucks an hour

Interesting. I saw contractor rates dropping here too. The ones I saw recently were at pre-pandemic levels so from 6 years ago. The large increase in cost of living from that time makes it even worse. The funny part is that the skills and experience that are being asked for are at a senior level. So I guess that would be senior level vibe coder at junior rates?

Management literally doesn't realize that you can't exactly vibe code a serious project? Maybe they just don't care and it's an experiment. Super low risk I guess, depending on the city they might pay the floor cleaner more than that.

I mean agentic coding is a thing but anyone could learn that in a day or week. So the idea of throwing away people that could be the most productive with ai of course make no sense. But it's big corporations, not everything has to make sense. It's most likely a dressed up pure cost saving framed in 2026-lingo.

I was going to say that sounds like short term gain for long term pain. But I'm guessing if there are any issues in the future, the government would just bail them out.

Yup thats exactly what they want

Cheaper younger people who dont think vibe coding is bad

Is this a good idea - probably not

It's a mistake. What you really want is senior engineers vibe coding.

It would be like hiring a junior to lead a team. They're the worst choice for that role.

What you really want is nobody vibe coding, because then your stuff will actually work. But that doesn't get the stock price to go up by announcing your "AI focus".

Vibe coded self driving cars sounds very interesting.

FWIW, I interpreted the article as saying they're not looking for vibe coding, but AI model development per se:

"...In practical terms, GM is looking for people who know how to build with AI from the ground up — designing the systems, training the models, and engineering the pipelines — not just use AI as a productivity tool."

I can guarantee you GM is not training any of their own models.

You can just check any of the vacancies on their website to see what they're looking for.

Example: AI Agent Engineer (https://search-careers.gm.com/en/jobs/jr-202606937/ai-agent-...)

> We are seeking an AI Agent Engineer to design, build, and operationalize AI-powered agents that enhance employee productivity and decision-making in a complex enterprise environment. The ideal candidate combines strong AI/ML foundations, hands-on experience with agent frameworks, and a pragmatic approach to delivering business value in partnership with cross-functional teams.

Does not look like pure vibe-coding to me. More like developing wrappers over LLMs.

Based on that description, we still have no idea what they are looking for, since it the only meaningful words in the first sentence are "design", "build", and "AI-powered agents". "Operationalize" isn't even a word, and "enhance employee productivity and decision-making" communicates nothing, except maybe that this is tools- or HR-oriented and not product-oriented. "Complex enterprise environment" can be omitted.

I would definitely pass on this job.

I didn't want to paste all the job requirements from that link here, but fair point.

AI-ensbled engineers == any engineer without sufficient life experience to inherently tell that delegating huge swathes of implementation to a stochastic parrot is a dangerous and fundamentally unsafe idea. It's spun around "knowing how to use the tools" but somehow the whole part around "knowing when not to use them and refusing to use them in those contexts" is conveniently written out of the definition of AI enabled. I personally sed s_AI/ enabled/ engineers_engineers/ with/ unreasonable/ risk/ tolerance_g.

When the business field turns you into a pariah because you refuse to bow to the uninitiated's desires tends to be my red line for an exit. I will not do reasonably foreseeable net harmful work for an industry that won't take no for an answer. My definition for reasonably foreseeable sets the minimum bar for analysis of consequence at enumerating 3rd and 4th degree consequences minimum.

They don't want engineers. They want Operators for whom thinking isn't in the job description.