Techie fired by Indian startup after AI writes code with glitch, breaks prod

An Indian techie shared a story of their coworker on Reddit who used to vibe code at work. The post claims that their coworker was promptly fired after their AI-generated code stopped production.

Vibe coding – the use of AI to write code – is quite popular now. So much so, that companies now claim that most of their engineers have stopped coding manually. However, sometimes relying too heavily on AI for coding may backfire, as was the case with one Indian techie, according to a Reddit post.

Reddit user u/Karmaisabeachhh shared a post on the subreddit, r/DevelopersIndia. The user explained that they joined a startup as a frontend engineer in a startup which was very AI-driven. The person later wrote that the startup was a fintech firm, though they did not name the company. At the time of joining, another person joined alongside them, who was eventually fired for using AI, despite the company’s focus on AI tools.

According to details shared, the coworker lacked prior internship experience, which made it difficult to manage deadlines. At first, the manager was supportive, but later the techie was forced to take the help of AI. The user wrote, “Initially they were generous and he was writing code by hand. Eventually they got tighter and tighter, and at one point, he had to start using AI to meet deadlines.”

Now, using AI to meet deadlines is not uncommon, most coders do use tools like Cursor today. However, according to the user, the techie didn’t understand what AI was actually doing. The post read, “He started understanding code in ‘chunks.’ So, this function basically does this, even though we don’t know how.”

Manual coding often allows developers to quickly identify and resolve errors due to their familiarity with the code structure. In contrast, AI-generated code can be far more complex and harder to debug. This forced the techie to use AI to fix codes made by AI. As noted in the post, "AI does not care if the file is fifteen thousand lines wrong. But after a point, it becomes a headache even looking at those files. So, this promotes fixing further bugs via AI."

The breaking point came late one night when a Slack notification alerted the team to a production failure. "It was all well and good until, one day, we get a slack call at 11PM, saying something broke in production. We then had to spend the entire next day trying to find and fix the problem. We found out that the problem was in his code," the user said.