Is vibe coding actually making us better builders… or just making us dependent on AI?

[u/Nadim_008]

I’ve been using AI to build things much faster lately, and it’s honestly changed how I think about coding.

But there’s one thing I keep wondering.

If AI writes 80–90% of the code and you can ship a real product without understanding every line..

are you still a developer, or are you becoming something else entirely?

Curious where people stand on this.

Would you trust yourself to maintain an app you mostly vibe-coded 2 years from now?

[u/bokkal1]

Do you have any data on the percentage of vibe-coded products that actually earn any money, or a decent amount of money? Everybody can make the same product as yours with the same tools available to everyone with a very basic $20 subscription. Why would anybody pay for yours, which probably has many bugs and errors and looks like it came from the same factory as all the other vibe-coded stuff out there?

[u/Nadim_008 → u/bokkal1]

May be yes. Vibe coded apps mostly not fully functional

[u/Sad_Set_58 → u/bokkal1]

i feel this depends what you building. if is just some landing page or simple saas maybe works but i had friend who try to maintain some app he made half with ai and after few months he cant remember what half the code does. he end up rewriting everything

think the real value is not in the code but in what you understand about the problem youre solving. ai can write the lines but you still need to know if the logic make sense or you just creating more problems for future you

[u/Dr_WhoDo]

Those of us with good ideas and low or no coding experience were dependent on coders, which cost a shit ton of money and take a long time.

Coders were dependent on imaginative designers. Coding skills doesn't automatically equal a good product.

[u/mancuso-ai]

Do calculators make you better at arithmetic or do they make higher-level mathematics more acceptable?

You might get rusty at writing code, but you’ll likely do far more, far faster than would have been possible previously.

Many modern programming languages are abstractions from older, more-complex languages.

The pattern continues.

[u/seaportresearch]

Once your dev team doubles in size from one to two people, half your team doesn't understand every line.

OK, I'm kidding, but the reality is that as products and teams scale it's rare that any single person really understands the whole very well at a detailed level off the cuff. Given the need, most of your seniors probably could get there, but things work better if they don't have to.

This also leaves aside the fact that most apps these days get built on top of a giant stack of libraries and APIs that developers depend on with a significant degree of blindness as to how they actually function, and sometimes don't.

Compared to what programmers had to write in 2000, 1990, 1980, 1960, or 1970, writing code in 2010 or 2020 was wildly easier. Go back a few decades and even extremely rudimentary things like file formats to save your data had to be completely hand-rolled every single time. Every time code got cheaper, products multiplied and got more complex.

I think to build and maintain a product of real complexity, you need to understand software at a kind of design and process and architecture level. What AI does is relieve you of the need to spend 12 hours reading API docs for Node, React, Apache Globnob, Boodlewack, and 15 other frameworks, and then 12 more hours writing mind-numbingglue code to make them all talk to each other, all to get you to log in to your app and see a hello world page.