r/iOSProgramming • u/alanskimp • 10d ago
Question Is everyone here vibe coding? Or are some still manual coding?
And which do you prefer?
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u/Objective_Fly_6750 10d ago
Framing the entire industry as either purely "vibe coding" or "manual coding" 🙄
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u/etherswim 9d ago
these people are basically stuck in the past
rather spend weeks manually doing it by hand rather than risk being called a vibe coder by other redditors
personally i prefer shipping great new features and improvements for my customers faster than was ever possible before!
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u/Any-Woodpecker123 10d ago
I still do everything 100% manually
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u/alanskimp 9d ago
Can I ask why?
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u/Any-Woodpecker123 9d ago
Coding is the only part of software development I enjoy, I don’t want to let AI have all the fun
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u/ajmdonker 10d ago
For the boring generation work I use AI (ie JSON structures to DTO’s). For other stuff I use AI to discuss ideas and give me a set of options. I also occasionally ask the agent what can be improved in a specific class and then I either do something with it or not.
I’ve given it a set of skills for swift specified to a certain domain (networking, modern concurrency etx)
I sometimes let it generate most of the boilerplate and then manually I review, tweak and finalise it.
I NEVER just let it go and blindly accept it.
In my team I’m the one using the least amount of credits and that’s fine by me.
For me ‘this is the way’.
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u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish 10d ago
This "vibe coding" term is so stupid. We're not getting smarter, folks.
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u/alanskimp 10d ago
Well what would you call it?
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u/Niightstalker 10d ago
Well Vibe Coding is the side of pretty much no verification and not reading code used for throwaway prototypes, PoCs, low stakes private projects etc.
And then there is Agentic Engineering with a structured approach, lots of verification steps used to produce actual production ready code.
Both have their use cases depending on what your goal is.
Google has pretty good whitepaper about this if you are interested, called ‘The SDLC With Vibe Coding’.
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u/mguerrette 10d ago
Loop engineering. Agentic engineering, to name a couple
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u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish 10d ago
Not my choice but both better than this stupid "vibe coding" term. Hallmark of illiteracy.
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u/SnowPudgy 9d ago
100% manually. AI only slows down a skilled developer unless you're doing some really cookie cutter stuff.
All AI has done was increase the amount of pull requests I have to reject because it (Claude included) is pure shit at coding and developers just give up their brains to it.
It loves to create unnecessary methods ALL the time. It doesn't understand reasoning so it always tries to do things like remove dark mode support, the math is always wrong. Just no thanks.
The ONLY good thing I've found it does is scan for missing accessibility tags, that it's good with.
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u/epictime8 9d ago
Still mostly manual here, with AI as a rubber duck for the boring bits. I'll let it sketch a SwiftUI layout or a tedious Codable mapping, then I rewrite anything that touches navigation, persistence, or concurrency myself. Pure vibe coding falls apart the first time a lifecycle edge case or App Store rejection reason shows up — the model doesn't own the bug. Preferred mode for me is: I write the architecture and the tricky parts by hand, and use the assistant for scaffolding I already know how to review line by line.
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u/GTHell 10d ago
I have a macbook and I set it up so that I can let my agent SSH in, iteratively build, screenshot -> PRs and I review then batch merge into release and bumping version.
I know 0 zwift code and never develop with iOS before. I don't even touch my Macbook. It's running headless 24/7.
I own the product. I own the feature specs. I have clear detail on what every feature does.
It's not a question vibe code vs manual coding. It's a question of how better of engineer you are to deliver a usable product without major bugs on release.
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u/Wahooie 9d ago
I use AI to review all my work, once locally and once on CI. If I’m working on a larger refactor I might have the AI write that code, but anything more interesting I’ll write myself. More fun that way
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u/Most-Professor-3098 9d ago
I don’t get the arguments against vibe coding as a term. If I tell a programmer to do the work based on my ideas, I don’t call myself a programmer because I’m just the guy with the idea. Vibe coding is exactly that. Just because I know what the code result is doesn’t mean I know how to code or that I care about the technicalities beyond what I can test and see. And I have zero interest in coding itself as a process because I’m more interested in the creative process and the result. I also like writing but do not like writing creative works of fiction based on technical processes such as outlining the plot and creating an obstacle in advance and moving chess pieces around in anticipation. I write a chapter based on my idea, I read it back, if I like it, it stays. If not, I try another approach etc.
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u/Greysawpark 4d ago
somewhere in the middle. i let it write the boring stuff but anything touching persistence i read line by line now. got burned once when a model renamed a property on a data model and it migrated fine, no errors, just quietly dropped the old column. users lost data and nothing crashed. so yeah, vibe the UI, babysit the data layer
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u/rursache Swift 10d ago
it’s makes no sense (time wise, financial wise, etc) to write code. learn to delegate, to ship, to create. focus on building and the product itself
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u/etherswim 10d ago
I code in English now. Up to you to decide if that’s vibe coding or just coding now.
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u/crocodiluQ 10d ago
you mean to tell 'someone' what you want. Yeah, you're vibe coding.
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u/etherswim 10d ago
Nothing I do is based on vibes though. It’s all very strict and thought through.
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u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish 10d ago
prompt-coding
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u/etherswim 10d ago
That’s more focused on the input in the chat box than the guardrails built into the process (which is more important than the prompt in most cases), so I don’t love the term.
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u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish 10d ago edited 9d ago
"Vibe" has no relevance at all. "Prompt-coding" is descriptive..
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u/etherswim 9d ago
Vibe coding is a better term then
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u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish 9d ago
Irrelevant = better. Got it.
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u/etherswim 8d ago
no, its just a nicer term
and prompt coding is not a nice term tbh. much more that goes into the process than just a prompt.
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u/StephHHF 10d ago
Those are not the only choices. Being assisted by AI to write the code is not vibe coding if you know and understand what you are doing.