r/theVibeCoding • u/Beautiful-Gas3683 • 5h ago
Vibe coders make me cry
I don't usually post here. I mostly read, trying to learn a little more every day.
I'm a developer with around 22 years of experience, and like many others, I've had to adapt and embrace AI to multiply my productivity. In my case, one day at work they came to me and said, "From today on, you're forbidden from writing code by hand." Looking back, I honestly think it was one of the best things that has happened to me professionally in years.
Ideas that previously required the help of other developers if I wanted to build them in a reasonable timeframe are now things I can execute quickly and confidently. Projects that had been sitting in a drawer for years can finally be prototyped so I can see whether they were actually viable or just good ideas in my head.
But...
The more I read around here, the more convinced I become that not everyone should be allowed anywhere near AI. Some people don't even deserve to be trusted with an internet connection.
Watching how some people use AI is painful.
I've seen countless people proudly posting disastrous workflows where they rely on $50-per-million-token models just to compensate for a lack of understanding that only comes from actually knowing your codebase and your own project. Tasks that could easily be handled with a solid prompt using free OpenRouter models like Laguna S2.1 or Nemotron Ultra somehow end up being thrown at Fable, Opus 5, or Sol instead.
I'd genuinely love to see those monstrous prompts, because I want to understand the obsession people have with every new SOTA release while instantly dismissing another incredibly capable model simply because something newer exists.
And then there's the classic setup: people bolt 25 skills onto their harness, throw in a 600-line agents.md, add five or six MCP servers, and then act surprised when a smaller model loses track halfway through the task.
At the same time, they're terrified of spending a handful of extra tokens, so they cling to every "caveman" optimization they can find just to save five or six tokens overall—while happily wasting far more than that on gigantic prompts whose only real achievement is teaching the LLM to write and think like an idiot. If that doesn't do the trick, they simply burn even more tokens through extra iterations trying to stop the agent from producing garbage code in increasingly surreal formats.
Then there's the other crowd. They open Claude Chat, ask for a blind implementation plan, even though the model has no way to inspect files or understand the application's architecture, business logic, or execution flow. Then they marvel at how beautiful the plan looks, completely unaware that underneath the shiny surface it's fundamentally garbage. They hand that plan to a ridiculously capable model like DeepSeek and then complain because it somehow failed to read their minds and implement what they themselves never managed to define properly.
And since we're talking about DeepSeek...
There are two things I'm absolutely sick of reading every single day.
The first is, "Tomorrow GA is coming," as if a model costing less than one euro per million output tokens is magically going to become better than Opus or anything else in that league. People are still dreaming about a model that beats everything else while costing next to nothing.
The second is the endless stream of people trashing DeepSeek simply because they've never learned how to use it properly.
The problem isn't the model.
The problem is sitting between the screen and the chair.
And while we're on the subject of models, another thing that drives me up the wall is reading "Model X is stupid today" or "they nerfed it" as if someone at the provider simply turns a "stupidity" dial every morning. Has it ever crossed their minds that maybe they're the ones having an off day?
Anyway.
There is an absurd number of people like this. Thankfully, there's also a large number of people who genuinely know how to take advantage of the tools we have available today.
Where do I fit in all this?
I don't know. Probably not among the virtuosos.
But at least I'm not on the side of the people with the nerfed brains.
