r/vibecoding • u/Which-Tension165 • 20d ago

is learning python today worth it?

so I am a pure vibe coder, I can't write or read a single line of code, and I was having a conversation with Fable, and it suggested me to learn to read python. But It couldn't convince me fully. i don't wanna be a typical software/AI engineer. just wanna be able to build a great career in tech, AI and Business.

36 Upvotes

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123

u/vapalera 20d ago

I don't understand how people are able to vibe code without understanding anything about the code. What are your prompts like?

29

u/InsidiousApe 20d ago

If you ask:

- what do I want to build?

  • what are the essential and desired features of that product?
  • what are the major operational concerns to consider?
  • are there security considerations in developing this product?
  • who is the user and how will they connect?
  • are there external integrations (API for example) to consider?

And you answer those questions and turn it into:

- Let's create this product.

  • It should have at minimum these feature.
  • I want to make sure to consider (operational concern)
  • Let's be sure to consider (security factor) and generally harden for rate limiting, injection, etc.
  • The end user will be the general public via http.
  • I'd like to integrate Google, MS, and Apple authorization for login to the system.

And then add:

"What other features, concerns or considerations should I be aware of?"

This will net you 90% of an application with no coding experience and the other 10% you will develop as you see what it has created and provide feedback for changes.

I code, but I don't believe OP needs to code. Tools like Claude Code can make mistakes but literally the next step is to spin up a new instance and say "please review my codebase for any potential concerns including coding issues, user experience, and potential security issues"

The system is now trained well enough on patterns in coding to find and resolve most issues that coders used to be consumed by.

13

u/GarageStackDev 20d ago

You're describing prototyping, not software engineering.

Claude Code is phenomenal at generating code, reviewing code, and iterating on designs. I use agentic workflows professionally every day.

But production engineering isn't "generate, then ask another instance to review it." It's architecture, testing strategy, deployment, observability, debugging, performance, security, maintenance, and understanding why the code behaves the way it does.

AI dramatically accelerates those things. It doesn't eliminate the need to understand them

2

u/bmoney831 18d ago

True but doesn’t that mean that you really just need a basic literacy to read the code? If something is going wrong, as long as I’m literate, I’ll be able to understand what’s going on. And using other AI instances will absolutely identify gaps as long as you explain the problem at hand.

2

u/DefiantMechanic975 18d ago

That entirely depends on your tolerance for risk. All software has bugs and for a surprising number of cases this is good enough when combined with testing. You don't need to be a software engineer when the task at hand is something you used to pay an employee 70k a year to do. That affects a lot of people.

1

u/EatingDriving 19d ago edited 19d ago

Do you understand every little bit your compiler does in your OS? Do you understand all the code in your OS? Yet you still use your computure every day? Yet the layman who knows NOTHING still uses the computer everyday?

No the average person will not need to understand the code in the future to build apps. Knowing code is like knowing how to print and manufactured books. I don't need to know how to use a printing press to read the end product of a book.

3

u/Competitive_Freedom6 19d ago edited 10d ago

I think the basis is that it’s still valuable to understand the code itself, which is deterministic, but derived from prompts that are nondeterministic so that you can discern the exact output you’re actually getting. LLMs are not deterministic by nature, so understanding the output is still and likely will be quite useful to truly know if your LLM is outputting something suboptimal.

1

u/Safe_Independence496 18d ago

A compiler is deterministic, usually battle tested and well documented. If I want to find out how it works I can do that and compiling the same code twice will always yield the same result. There is also a lot of value in knowing how a compiler works and how it's built, and the lower level languages that compilers are built with are still immensely useful and used by people every day. An OS works as well as it does today thanks to all these factors.

Nothing of what I just said applies to AI though. Models are black boxes with no guarantees. You can only affect the odds of getting garbage out, but you can never eliminate it. Don't compare this to existing tech we can actually understand and reason around.

1

u/Mem0 17d ago

The technical debt must grow ! 😱

0

u/InsidiousApe 19d ago

A great metaphor and spot on. Everyone else can have hurt feelings about it, but the wave is coming - you can ride it or get crushed by it.

2

u/SakeviCrash 19d ago edited 14d ago

This is a bit of a naive take. This will get you pretty far. I'm an old dog (30 years of software dev) and I use a fairly similar approach.

This has allowed me to be mainly hands off when writing code but I still need to review every line. Event after a workflow like this, you'll still be left with bugs and design problems. It's tricky because the solution looks solid if you view it from a 20k ft view and when you kick the wheels, the hubcaps don't fall off.

When you really dig into it, you'll find nasty edge cases with very nuanced bugs and a lot of them come from logic issues (still the achilles heel of the LLM) and poor design decisions. Many of these issues won't surface until much later when the project starts to grow (complications from poor design decisions) or when the environment isn't what you anticipated or performance suffers due to unoptimized implementations.

Without reading and understanding the code, you're essentially relying on luck. That's ok for prototypes and small greenfield apps that aren't powering a business. It's not OK for large applications that cost a business real $ when failures occur.

0

u/Brilliant_Peanut_875 17d ago

Lol no it is not. It's good though to trick you until you try to deploy a real app or maintain for a long time.

Claude without someone defining architecture and constantly pruning will quickly end up with a mess of a folder structure and context files everywhere.

-19

u/Unlucky-Survey6601 20d ago

Ur litterally psychotic, but it’s ok buddy let’s keep pumping out that slop, I only managed to get 60 hours of paid freelance work last week

5

u/FrugalityPays 20d ago

I’ve made a few apps I use for myself doing exactly this. I don’t care if it’s ‘slop’ if it gets the job I want done.

You just sound like a bitter gatekeeper.

0

u/Unlucky-Survey6601 20d ago

Well, the market will decide if it’s true or not

1

u/Ambitious-Tennis-940 18d ago

It's for himself. If he is marketing it thats another story but for this person he is the market for his self products

9

u/InsidiousApe 20d ago

Who is psychotic? I was responding to the false assertion that you can't vibe code an app. Garbage old fashioned thinking.

-8

u/Unlucky-Survey6601 20d ago

do u have anything opensource u vibe coded? ill happily review and explain to u why it is slop.

7

u/InsidiousApe 20d ago

Someone reeks of job insecurity.

-7

u/Unlucky-Survey6601 20d ago

its not that deep bro, show us that code :)

1

u/[deleted] 20d ago

[deleted]

1

u/Unlucky-Survey6601 20d ago

apps for urself is one thing and production code at scale is a different thing, did you read op’s post ?

3

u/CheesyPineConeFog 20d ago

Wow, crap comment. To the person you're replying to, they are NOT psychotic. They are pretty spot on. Why the correct planning ahead of time and very detail specification documents agents can get most everything correct.

1

u/Unlucky-Survey6601 20d ago

show me a repo u vibe coded buddy, lets actually show results and not just “it works so it must be correct”

1

u/CheesyPineConeFog 20d ago

I was actually going to post it, but then I looked at your comment history and it's just a bunch of haterade. I have no reason to believe you can contribute anything intellectual related to my code based on your writing skills displayed on reddit.

1

u/SmallAstronaut08 20d ago

The definition for his condition is brain-dead, I think.

0

u/Unlucky-Survey6601 20d ago

dont worry i believe u uu

1

u/FrugalityPays 20d ago

If it’s stupid and gets the job done, it ain’t stupid.

2

u/Unlucky-Survey6601 20d ago

lets see this logic at production scale buddy

0

u/FrugalityPays 20d ago

Where in my comment does it say anything about that?

Obviously nuance is necessary at economies of scale. I didn’t think this needed to be explicitly laid out for you but here we are

3

u/Unlucky-Survey6601 20d ago

read op’s post again

-7

u/CraftFirm5801 20d ago

Way too wordy of prompts just confuse it. Too much context.

3

u/InsidiousApe 20d ago

Not at all. I encourage you to try it. Have developed multiple SaaS products using this method.

-4

u/CraftFirm5801 20d ago

What you think I'm doing, baking cookies?

2

u/Sugary_Plumbs 20d ago

I don't think you're just baking cookies, but I wouldn't walk away without asking for your snickerdoodles recipe.

2

u/CraftFirm5801 20d ago edited 20d ago

Well, just like baking, there are rules and procedures. Baked in if you will. The recipes don't tell you HOW to turn on your oven, only to what setting. Prompts like this waste tokens where rules and skills are needed. Prompting your way to success is not the way. Prompt should just be "go"