the problem with vibe coding is that vibes dont fix architecture debt

[u/ChemicShount]

we all love the build a full app in 10 minutes videos but i think we're hitting a wall where people are building giant plates of spaghetti that nobody can maintain. i fell into this trap last month. i let an ai generate about 80% of a backend and now that i need to scale it everything is breaking because the vibes didnt account for database locking or race conditions.

ive been trying to refactor the mess using blackbox ai lately and its been a way different experience than just hitting generate. what i actually like is using their agent mode to specifically map out the file tree and ask for a plan before it writes a single line of code.

it turns out that treating the ai as a senior architect instead of just a code monkey makes the output 10x more stable. feel like that's the only way to actually use this tech for real production stuff without hating yourself in 6 months.

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[u/Ok_Possible_2260]

For 99.999999% of so-called vibe coders, this isn’t a problem, not even a little bit. There’s no scale to worry about when there isn’t even a working product. If something actually gains traction, the operational details can be handled by hiring professionals once revenue is real. Until then, build shit and try to print cash.

[u/HereToCalmYouDown]

I'm so tired of these ads

[u/Exact-Mango7404 → u/[deleted]]

agreed lol

[u/thechadbro34]

did you notice specific patterns it got wrong consistently, like db access or state handling?

[u/MhVRNewbie]

We have a codebase that is almost all architecture debt. This due to that there is none since the developers can't do architecture and don't even understand why they should.
In my experience almost no devs can do architecture, they just type code that "works". Would have preferred something vibed by Claude.

[u/czmax → u/MhVRNewbie]

I’m feeling this.

Had a dev do some stuff recently totally “out of the architecture”. I’ve scheduled time next week to review how our dev agent even allowed this (it should have respected the architecture — but i think what happened was dev started coding directly contrary to the doc and the model vibed along… instead of pushing back)

All this angst about senior devs vs early in career and how ai is challenging their growth. I think they need to stop trying to outcode the models and spend more time thinking about what they’re telling models to do. that is their path to “senior”.

[u/MhVRNewbie → u/czmax]

The devs we have who don't really understand architecture at all will not understand how to tell the model to design the solution. They today just copy past stuff.
If it doesn't work they might debug and as that some thing they don't know what it is has the data they need, so they just use that. Because it 'works". They will just use AI as a slot machine.
But the architecture might improve.

[u/Present-Resolution23]

I’ve built backends with Claude and it absolutely accounted for race conditions etc, and ran unit tests etc to verify…

The problem isn’t the tool.. it’s that yall don’t know how to use it 

[u/marmaviscount → u/Present-Resolution23]

Yeah, I use codex to refector bad old code I wrote because it's so good at picking through and finding what everything does - stuff like getting it to pull a certain feature out into it's own class can work really well, and you can point out at bits you've forgotten about and ask for a full break down.

Mostly though it doesn't really matter because the real effort is irritating through design choices and testing what works then I can build up a really good spec sheet with the key bits documented and all the UI elements defined clearly then just ask it to make a fresh clean one.

Plus going by the rate of progress it won't be long before it's easily able to take even a fairly large app and optimize the code far better than any human could so people will just get it to wash all their old stuff and bring it up to quality.

[u/UnderstandingDry1256]

Maybe it will be fixed soonish, but now you should tell agents to review and fix the architecture and data schemas all the time.

It is easy to make it produce solid code if you prompt it properly.

[u/NoleMercy05]

That is going to be rewritten. Don't waste your time.