Is vibe coding a new mandatory job requirement?

We won’t hire anybody moving forward who doesn’t have hands-on agentic programming experience. We’re in the traditionally slower moving GovTech space. I have to imagine this is now a common expectation in many sectors.

Teams where I work can use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Copilot CLI. Internally, it seems like Claude Code and Codex are the more popular tools being used by most software teams.

If you’re new to these tools, I highly recommend trying to build something with them during your free time. This space has evolved rapidly the past few months. Anthropic is offering a special spring break promotion where you can double the limits on weeknights and weekends for any of its subscription plans until the end of March.

I'd say that a this point, if your job involves computers and you aren't at least familiar with how you can leverage AI tools, you're basically admitting that you really enjoy the art of working with one hand tied behind your back.

That's not vibe coding. Imagine if you were hiring a chef and a candidate came in who'd never used a stove. Sure, technically there are other ways to heat food, but it would be a bit odd.

In fact, they want 10 years of vibe coding experience

We do not interview for this nor care about it, despite using agentic and code complete tooling heavily. It's not a deep technical skill like C++ that requires years of hands-on experience. Spend a few weeks getting comfortable with Claude Code and you're probably at about parity with most devs. That seems like sort of a red flag to me to have that as a job requirement.

Building software with llm is easier than you imagine. I'd be surprised if you just don't pick it up. No need to lie, just open codex or claude and give it a try.

I couldn't imagine wanting to hire someone who doesn't use LLMs for coding unless they are bringing something very special to the table. It accelerates many coding tasks significantly. But you have to know the limitations to use them efficiently and that only comes with experience.

I think AI assisted coding is a new job requirement, and I think the more I do it the more I’m convinced it’s going to wreck productivity. And it’s not because these tools aren’t as good as people say they are, it’s because they’re too good.

Everyone talking about vibe coding all your dependencies and the problem is that the people who are good with these tools and do get 50% or greater productivity benefits won’t be able to empathize with the people who are bad with these tools and create all the slop.

I think AI encourages people to take side quests to solve easy problems and not focus on hard problems.

That without domain expertise problems will compound themselves. But I dunno, I agree that they’re here to stay.

Depending on your standards, seems like a potential indicator of companies to avoid?

Personally I still believe that despite AI being moderately useful and getting better over time, it's mostly only feasible for boilerplate work. I do wonder about these people claiming to produce millions of lines of code per day with AI, like what are you actually building? If it's then Nth CRUD app then yeah, I see why... Chances are in the grand scheme of things, we don't really need that company to exist.

In roles that require more technical/novel work, AI just doesn't make the cut in my experience. Either it totally falls over or produces such bad results that it'd be quicker for a skilled dev to make it manually from scratch. I'd hope these types of companies are not hiring based on AI usage.

Oh definitely seems like it. In Australia, at least, I am seeing job ads from recruiters with titles like "AI Engineer" or asking for "LLM-assisted development" or "agentic development" and so on.

I noticed that some of these roles come from businesses that recently had layoffs and were now asking their staff to "do more with less" so not exactly places people would be eager to work at, unless they have to.

I don't know if this is the new norm but this craziness is not helped by the increase in the number of "AI influencers" pushing the hype. Unfortunately, I've been seeing this on HN a lot recently.

I think recruiters would like to see what candidates will do when get some free time. It is not really a lifestyle. It is a short amount of time. Maybe couple of weekends, before they get some other work or get laid off.

E.g., Nobody wants to continue working with someone who create sound effects, movie player, operating system, etc.

Its a valuable tool that I'd argue everyone is still figuring out how to do it well and the best practices keep changing rapidly. Even more so than everyone was figuring out how to do software well in the first place. Almost all of the best practices are made up, not validated, and kind of magical thinking.

In 2026 this is being replaced by agent co-ordination. So the requirement becomes - experience co-ordinating multiple coding and or chat models in a long project spread over multiple machines.

Jesus Christ. Imagine reading these comments even just a year ago.

Don’t know/care about coding with AI? You’re unhireable now. Grim.

Agentic AI-assisted coding is an intrinsic part of the job now. Companies would be leaving lots of money on the table if they didn't take advantage of the 10x/50x/100x productivity gains. If you don't have the skills, learn. Shape up or ship out.

I feel like people genuinely don't understand what vibe coding means.

Just cause you're using an LLM doesn't mean you're "vibe coding".

I regularly use LLMs at work, but I don't "vibe-code", which is where you're just saying garbage to the model and blindly clicking accept on whatever is spit out from it.

I design, think about architecture, write out all of my thoughts, expected example inputs, expected example outputs, etc. I write out pretty extensive prompts that capture all of that, and then request for an improved prompt. I review that improved prompt to make sure it aligns with the requirements I've gathered.

I read the output like I'm doing a deep code review, and if I don't understand some code I make sure to figure it out before moving forward. I make sure that the change set is within the scope of the problem I'm trying to solve.

Excluding the pieces that augment the workflow, this is all the same stuff you would normally do. You're an engineer solving problems and that domain you do it in happens to involve software and computers.

Writing out code has always been a means to an end. The productivity gains if you actually give LLMs a shot and learn to use the tools are real. So yes, pretty soon it's going to become expected from most places that you use the tools. The same way you've been expected to use a specific language, framework, or any other tool that greatly improves productivity.

The framing of "is vibe coding a job requirement" conflates two things: the skill of coding-by-prompting, and the skill of knowing what you need to build. The second one is genuinely underrated. Knowing your problem well enough to describe a working solution, the inputs, the logic, the outputs, who uses it, is hard to automate. Generating the actual app from that description is increasingly not. We've been using Lyzr Architect (architect.new) for this; you describe the agentic app you want in plain English, it generates a full-stack React frontend + multi-agent backend and deploys a live URL. The "vibe coding" is more like a product spec conversation than an IDE session. The people who are best at it aren't coders, they're people who understand their problem deeply.

I don't think vibe coding is becoming mandatory, but writing software using AI assistance is. I find Salvatore Sanfilippo's distinction between vibe coding and 'automatic programming' useful. [0]

[0] https://antirez.com/news/159

dead internet theory is really taking grip

In the same way that typing is a job requirement. It's just how you interface with the code now.

A decent company wouldn't necessarily look for someone who can type faster or commit 100x more code like the vibers do, but look into how you understand the code.

The accountability asymmetry feels like the real problem. The person prompting claims completion; the reviewer absorbs the cleanup. That gap exists because there's no record of what the agent actually decided — just the output, not the sequence that produced it. If you had a trace of tool calls and decision points, at least you'd know where the slop came from and who should own it. Right now review is just guessing backwards.

At my company, we ask everyone in the hiring process about how they have used any kind of agentic coding tools.

We're not concerned about hiring for the 'skill' of using these things, but more as a culture check - we are a very AI-forward company, and we are looking for people who are excited to incorporate AI into their workflow. The best evidence for such excitement is when they have already adopted these tools.

Among the team, the expectation is that most code is being produced with AI, but there is no micromanager checking how much everyone is using the AI coding tools.

Here’s another question. Has anyone been able to get an agent to produce reliable high quality code?

My first experience with it was a year ago and the tests it produced were so horrendously hard to maintain that I kinda gave up, but I imagine that things have gotten a lot better in the last year.