Senior Developers Become ‘AI Babysitters’ in the Era of Vibe Coding, but Experts See Promising Future
As artificial intelligence-powered coding tools, often called “vibe coding,” become increasingly prevalent, senior software developers find themselves spending a substantial portion of their workdays debugging and correcting AI-generated code. While this new workflow—where senior devs act as vigilant overseers or “AI babysitters”—adds a new layer of responsibility, many believe the efficiency trade-offs are worth it for the future of software development.
Carla Rover, a web developer with 15 years of experience and founder of a startup focused on custom marketplace machine learning models, shared her emotionally charged experience with vibe coding. After relying heavily on AI to generate code for a project, she faced extensive errors that forced her to restart the entire codebase, leaving her so overwhelmed she reportedly spent 30 minutes in tears. “I handed it off like the copilot was an employee,” Rover said, “It isn’t,” emphasizing the current limits of AI-generated coding assistance.
Rover’s story reflects a widespread challenge. A recent survey by Fastly involving nearly 800 developers discovered that 95% spend additional time fixing AI-generated code, predominantly senior developers. These veterans find themselves in a paradox: while AI accelerates initial code generation, its imperfections demand significant manual review and correction, transforming experienced coders into what some call “vibe code cleanup specialists.”
Feridoon Malekzadeh, developer and startup founder utilizing vibe coding platforms like Lovable, revealed that up to 40% of his development time goes toward debugging AI-created scripts. His workflow typically breaks down into 50% writing requirements, 20% actual AI coding, and 30-40% fixing bugs and cleaning up errors generated by AI tools.
Despite the time spent on verification and corrections, many developers agree that vibe coding is reshaping the software creation landscape in vital ways. It provides an unprecedented speed and flexibility, allowing ideas to be rapidly conceptualized and prototyped. Rover described vibe coding as “a beautiful, endless cocktail napkin on which one can perpetually sketch ideas,” underscoring its value in the creative and early stages of product development.
However, this comes with the caveat that AI coding outputs can be unpredictable and sometimes “worse than babysitting,” requiring constant vigilance to ensure production-quality results. Developers are experimenting with new workflows to mitigate these issues, such as defining detailed AI agent instructions, implementing coding style guidelines, and introducing automated test writing protocols to improve AI reliability.
Industry observers agree the rise of vibe coding marks a fundamental shift but caution that the technology and its integration into workflows are still evolving. The role of senior developers is expanding beyond traditional coding into supervising AI as a collaborator, necessitating new skills in AI oversight and quality assurance.
As AI programming assistants continue to improve, it is anticipated that the time spent babysitting code will decrease, enabling senior developers to refocus more on creative problem-solving and complex system design. For now, though, vibe coding represents a challenging yet promising frontier in software development, with seasoned developers leading the charge in mastering this new paradigm.
Reported by TechCrunch and corroborated by recent developer surveys and expert interviews.