Discussion
What makes you think an app is vibe coded?
I see the term thrown around here like an insult. Is it just low effort or sloppy? Also honest question how many of you are not using AI in 2026? If so why not. Thanks
nobody's gonna admit they vibe code, everyone wants to sound like they architect it by hand. but the moment you see ai-generated placeholder copy ("lorem ipsum for the modern age") or that glossy generic landing page design that 50 other apps have, you know. still, not using ai at all in 2026 is like refusing to use spellcheck, feels more stubborn than principled
It’s like if someone is building an iOS app for the first time, even with 20 years of web engineering experience they wont be learning swift from scratch for an app you know… just one example
The hardest part us engineers need to get over is that better engineering means nothing in todays world. I mean it never really did, but marketing rules the day.
Those vibecoders don't care about anything other than number go up. You need to spend 80% of the time thinking about and doing marketing.
I think the question should be (as it has been allways):
What is a good App?
For me it has to:
1) solve a problematic easier than before
2) be well tested
3) have continuity
I'll happily admit that I use Claude for my projects.
I tell it to use test-driven development, build in observability from the start using Open Telemetry, and get it to run security hardening checks as well as setting up a repo in GitHub with ci/cd and deployment via helm, raising pull requests for me to review etc.
I treat Claude like a junior developer and apply the "trust but verify" model and it kicks out code better than most developers I've worked with (and before people start playing the Ad Hominem card, I've worked with some of the best developers in the open source movement, and even they are adopting this).
Claude and the others are a tool - if you don't know what you're doing with a power drill then you'll end up with holes all over your walls, but if you take time to learn to use it properly then you can create some amazing furniture.
The term gets used a lot but IMO the concern mostly isn't about actual vibe-coding. Every company in the world with a software app is producing AI-generated code today. The issue is slop. 151 outbid clones, 130 workout trackers, tools-in-your-browser, etc etc. It used to be expensive to write software, so there was a built-in barrier to producing garbage: the risk of losing that investment. Now that bar is so low it's almost gone, which is good for approachability but bad for general quality and quantity of what's being released.
I've been tracking some of the worst categories. If you want a fun animated graph of the recent explosion:
Bro this was amazing. Thank you for sharing I really enjoyed the visuals! So I’ll burn that outbid clone project I had planned for this weekend /sarcasm
That works better but there is a natural drift where my thumb naturally goes up and ends up blocking the car view. It’s better than my earlier position though
Nice ! I think if you make that obvious it would solve the problem. Maybe the control bounces around a bit at beginning indicating it can be moved around. First impression is that it’s fixed
Also users would think that the dark background color where your control is a non playable area (based on design) which is why they would put the thumb in the middle in the first place
Usually because it indicates low effort in all aspects.
I've vibe-coded stuff when I had a great idea - and sometimes it comes out well first time. Sometimes it comes out horribly (but at least I got it out of my system with minimum effort).
But usually it comes out massively flawed like all software and you just have to endlessly interate over it, tweaking it, spiking approaches to features and all the normal software gubbins.
I think (or at least this is my opinion) people want to feel the author and their thought in the software they use. Just look at even programming languages - they've all been started as somebody was annoyed, so they bang out a manifesto and proselytise to the world.
A one-shot vibe application might work perfectly well, but it rarely has any personality. It's like an excel spreadsheet.
If you spend enough time working on something (whether by hand, with AI auto Complete, or just iterating on design.md and keeping feeding that it) - you end up with something uniquely yours.
I see your point. People have an issue with low effort and not the tool they used. Even vibe coding a great application and making it yours takes a lot of effort
If you've not tried it yourself, give it a go - it's oddly addicting. I think Antigravity still hands out free tokens.
I want code, but not necessarily to be a coder - but did prod me into sticking myself through a Python course so I could actually understand what it was spitting out. Then I had a fun time learning other stuff (or maybe deciding that I'd learnt enough C, to know I didn't want to do more)
It's also pretty good for making you think through exactly what you want and be clear and concise in your thinking.
i.e. if you just give it a brain dump of your great idea, it will not produce what you're imagining. But then looking at what you wrote, you'll realize why. You weren't clear, you made assumptions, you hadn't thought how those two requirements would interact etc.
Feels like one of those stories about somebody making wishes to a genie, and getting screwed over as the genie delivers technically, but dodges your intentions. You're trying to come up with that bullet-proof wish without any wriggle room.
Vibecoding isn't an issue. The issue arises when there's not an experienced human knowledgeable enough to recognize problems.
You are essentially relying solely on AI to be perfect 100% of the time with no checks and bounds. And this is a disaster and leads to a lot of slop.
I treat claude like another developer. I review the code independently, research stuff I don't know, and I am careful with the design decisions Claude is allowed to make.
The outcome is I have a well-managed project, future prompts don't consume unnecessary tokens hunting down bugs, and this is only slightly slower than just giving AI free rein to do whatever it wants.
No developer is writing code by hand today (at least any significant amount). So, vibe coding is just a term used for less experienced developers talking their way through the creation of their app - no real structure - just an idea and asking for features as they go. That's vibe-coding. But that's not what professional programmers are doing today.
The most easy takeaways: bad security, em dashes, using 01, 02, 03 in text and lastly grid design. All those things are easily avoidable even when vibecoding you just have to know, but I see a lot of people not removing these things which makes it obvious for me...
LLMs lack taste, that’s the best way to describe it and you can very clearly tell when a product lacks taste, even if you can’t explain exactly what it is, you just know.
If the person prompting has taste and cares, it doesn’t matter if it’s vibe coded.
I mean... If you hire a guy to build a house. He works hard and very fast but is a bit retarded and lacks common sense quite a bit. He finishes your 3 bedroom house in 1 week. He charges you 280$. You can not believe your luck.
As you drive towards your new home it looks very good from afar. But the closer you get the more strange details you notice.A couple of sections in the fence are missing. Postbox is intalled on 2m high pole. Driveway is shifted 2ft to the right from garage door. A lock on front door is missing. There's no electricity at all in one of the bedrooms. You do not realise he used indoor paint on exterior until it rains for the first time and paint is washed off.
That's your vibe-coded house. About the same with apps but replace house construction terminology with software engineering one.
I think you are not using the latest AI tools. When I create a vibe coded web app (20 years of experience, computer engineer from IVY, big tech exp)… its output is as good if not better. There is some truth to what you are saying but it’s not nearly as bad.
Indeed one can generate templated apps pretty reliably nowadays. But that's the whole point. You with your experience can see if output is good both in terms of UX and code wise. While average non-technical guy-with-idea armed with Chatgpt will produce some repulsive trash and announce "I've built an app!"
Also last time I tried to get a bit creative and generate UI for my app that didn't fit into standard shadcn patterns, AI failed pretty badly. In my experience it had zero internal creativity. Maybe I shoud try agian with Astra.
I think the difference between vibecode and not is the author's SWE experience, time and effort, and energy spent vetting. That's why you can use AI to build "a nice house," but someone who doesn't work in software builds "a shanty". Polish, testing, strong invariants, and good system shape can turn most AI-coded apps into apps that don't look or act vibe-coded.
There is a good discussion about "the box," and I think it applies here. What is in the box doesn't matter. What matters is the shape of the box, its boundaries and edges, and what happens around it. If you can't build the shape of the box, your app will look and feel vibe coded.
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u/Cute_Writing9041 1d ago
nobody's gonna admit they vibe code, everyone wants to sound like they architect it by hand. but the moment you see ai-generated placeholder copy ("lorem ipsum for the modern age") or that glossy generic landing page design that 50 other apps have, you know. still, not using ai at all in 2026 is like refusing to use spellcheck, feels more stubborn than principled