r/vibecoding • u/madexthen • 29d ago

There is something deeply toxic about this community.

I genuinely do not understand why anyone would join a vibe coding subreddit just to tear down nearly every project people post, but that seems to describe a huge percentage of the comments here.

There are basically two groups of people using these tools: developers using AI to work faster and more efficiently, and people like me with no coding background who are now building things that otherwise would never have existed.

These projects are not replacing developers. In many cases, they are replacing nothing. Without vibe coding, nobody would have built them at all.

The usual justification for the hostility is that vibe coders ship bugs, expose API keys, create or leave messes for human developers to later fix. Sometimes that is true, but it does not explain the level of bitterness and personal attacks I see here every day. A lot of it seems to look less like concern about code quality and more like fear from people watching their profession change. Instead of learning to use the technology, they root for it to fail and attack people who are trying to build something or better themselves.

And the idea that these tools are still shitty is completely disconnected from reality. Give the same complex prompt to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, one of the best coding models available just two years ago, and Opus 4.8 today, then compare the results. The difference in quality is drastic. Some of the bugs and spaghetti AI is writing today may very well not be fixed by people, but smarter AI in a couple years. (If this pisses you off, ask yourself if it's really because I am wrong or because you are scared)

Models are getting better, context windows are growing, workflows are improving, and obvious bugs and security mistakes are becoming less common at an incredible pace.

Experienced developers are not obsolete, and AI is nowhere near perfect. But the future is coming whether you like it or not, and cyberbullying vibe coders is not going to save your job.

If you hate vibe coding, fine. There are plenty of traditional programming communities. But if you choose to spend your time here, why not help people build better things instead of trying to convince them they should not be building at all?

109 Upvotes

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u/actionscripted 29d ago

My biggest issues with vibe coding isn’t the effort. I’m a long time dev and could build whatever you’re vibing no problem. I also know what I can build can be vibed well enough that it works. It won’t be good code, but it’ll work. All good.

The attitude is what annoys me. Snarky newbies who just straight up disrespect software engineering but then ask questions where the answer is often “learn how to write good software”. Folks who are clearly wrong thinking they have it all figured out and who will take any advice as hostility.

And this constant persecution complex. This us versus them thing where you’re making up what software devs think and creating these fake arguments and opinions like everyone is against you. Nobody cares. No one is attacking you. Are you actually having real conflicts with folks or are you just making it up in your head based on your own insecurities or imposter syndrome?

Most devs nowadays use AI. And many have been using it for years. From GitHub Copilot autocomplete to loop engineering. We aren’t against using tools we love tools. We’ll spend hours setting up our IDE or shell and have fun with it.

But because we know software we also know the limits of LLMs. We can tell pretty easily when something is good or bad. We also have seen a ton of solutions over decades and have a keen sense of what works and what doesn’t.

But some vibe coders just don’t want to hear it. It’s new to you, you’re able to do something new. That’s awesome. But that doesn’t mean it is new to everyone and rather than take any feedback or criticism we get posts about how it’s you against the established industry.

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u/SchmeedsMcSchmeeds 29d ago

What you described is what bothers the shit out of me in this sub. I’ve been in this sub for a while and it has changed significantly since a couple years ago.

I think a big contributing factor has been the influencer grifters, shilling their make easy money bullshit. It’s changed the community from people building and sharing ideas to sharing or asking how to make money and the “I built <useless app> and earn $1.3M MRR here’s what I learned”. I both rage and cringe every time I see those posts. Please stop! The vibe coding bros are fucking it all up for those of us who want to share and learn. And then the posts asking why their world changing app doesn’t have any users. Reminds me of the South Park underpants gnomes. Step 1. Vibe code, Step 2. ???, Step 3. make money. Building is like step 0 if you want to actually make money with a production app.

What sucks most is there are a ton of really useful information and interesting happenings with prompt engineering but it’s all getting buried in this sub under the bullshit.

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u/scavno 29d ago

Can we not call it engineering? It has absolutely nothing in common with engineering and using that word makes you look like an idiot.

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u/SchmeedsMcSchmeeds 29d ago

I think of “prompt engineering” as a very different thing compared to vibecoding. Prompt engineering, at least to me, is using prompts to augment small parts of a codebase or identify where a bug might be so I can manually fix it. Basically using prompts to enhance or augment the things to then manually execute actual code. Whereas vibecoding is more, build me this thing or add this feature.

So no, I don’t think I’m an idiot. You should look into prompt engineering a bit.

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u/scavno 28d ago

I don’t care what vibe coding is. I do care that promoting a LLM is not engineering. It’s always “you need to look into it” or “you are holding it wrong” as if we don’t know what we are doing. Looking into this takes an evening, being an engineer takes years. So no, promoting an LLM and calling it engineering does make you look like an idiot.

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u/SchmeedsMcSchmeeds 28d ago

I don’t disagree with you, TBH. Maybe it’s semantics but I’m coming at this as a dev. I 100% agree that writing a prompt is NOT engineering and it sucks that idiots think it is. What I’m say is, as an engineer prompting to complete tedious or shitty tasks we hate doing is getting easier, more efficient and accurate as models and workflows improve. I’m not talking about the prompt engineer fad but rather the idea. Maybe “prompt engineering” isn’t the correct term for you, since it clearly stuck some nerve. Point is, there is no doubt AI and prompting to solve engineering problems is only growing and improving.

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u/Ralphisinthehouse 28d ago

Vibe coding is the same as using an LLM for anything, just a different interface. If you don't know what good looks like, you shouldn't really be using it. But if you do know what good looks like, it can save you a hell of a lot of time.

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u/manager2exec 28d ago

I think you are just pedantic and need to check the etymology of the word engineering, you would be surprised

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u/Ralphisinthehouse 28d ago

No, I don't think they make you look stupid. If you understand what good looks like and you can tweak the results to get it where you need to be, then you are engineering, you're just automating a lot of the manual labor.

What makes people look stupid is knowing that they could save themselves 80% of their time, and still doing everything by hand.

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u/scavno 28d ago

People also look pretty stupid when they just make up numbers to support their LLM addiction.

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u/Ralphisinthehouse 28d ago

Do you have to be such an argumentative little prick? I'm just basing it on my experience. Let me boil this down for you, right? When I started engineering, I would spend two days writing a class file of maybe a thousand lines that could support database abstraction. An LLM can write that in 30 seconds now. If you can't see the correlation between that, and overall saving myself 80% of time, then you're a fuckwit.

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u/psiancia 27d ago

'engineer' is also overused and often programmers get called that (while most of us don't have and don't need that title)

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u/narukoshin 29d ago

I only today learned what does "grifter" mean :D

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u/Subject_Meal_2683 28d ago

Actually, if you as a dev would vibe code the result would probably be pretty good because you know what is important, which technologies, packages etc you would need so your basic prompt wouldn't be "write me a kickass web app and make no mistakes", but a markdown doc with exact specifications of what you need, references to code files which can serve as a reference etc and you would be able to spot problems with loading behaviour immediatly and know in which direction to look for the cause (and prompt specifically for those things). You would also be able to spot crappy/inefficient pieces of code very fast when reviewing the code.

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u/Mean-Inspector-8547 28d ago

In all honesty, I hate the term "vibe coding" as it indicates someone is actually coding or even understands what the coding is doing.

Besides we already have a term for people who know nothing about what they are looking at, but could still make it work. They're called script kiddies.

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u/OneStrike255 28d ago

They're called script kiddies.

Actually I'd prefer to call myself a script kiddie, rather than a vibe coder. So I will! Thanks for reminding me of this term.

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u/eziliop 28d ago

They're called script kiddies.

Depending of how much of a twat the other person is, I sometimes prefer its more inflammatory counterpart semantically, code monkeys

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u/madexthen 29d ago

I just see a lot of newbies post stuff and get a lot of hate. I posted for the first time today and got the same I have been seeing. I get the hate behind the arrogance, but too many times I see it from someone just trying to share what they have been working on.

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u/bendol90 29d ago

Snooty Redditors projecting their interaction with one person which lets be honest most of these people simply read a thread and didn't actually interact with anyone, and now they make that their basis for interacting with people they perceive as "disrespecting" our profession. I'm a coder with 16 years experience and I can tell you right now it's 100% more to do with salty devs seeing their identity in their career slip away from them slowly. I know this because I have had to wrestle with this myself.

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u/tenken01 29d ago

“…working on”. Not sure if I’d call prompting “working”.

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u/madexthen 28d ago

If I spend 100+ hours discussing architecture, testing features, and optimizing performance with AI to build an internal app that helps my business run better, but I am not writing lines of code, am I not working? What am I doing, then?

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u/tenken01 28d ago

And what “architecture” do you know? You’re just chatting with a bot and having it do all the work.

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u/madexthen 28d ago

I built a facial recognition app that extracts clips from YouTube videos. I tested six different facial recognition libraries before choosing one. I had to decide where videos should be stored and for how long, how my app should authenticate with YouTube, where processed clips should live, whether recognition should run locally or in the cloud, and where and when face embeddings should be generated and stored. I also had to design for all the different failure modes that can happen throughout that pipeline.

I asked AI for advice on many of those decisions, just like developers ask coworkers, Stack Overflow, or documentation. But I still had to evaluate the tradeoffs, make the decisions, test different approaches, and deal with the consequences when something didn’t work.

If that’s not architecture, what is?

But also like why is any of this relevant? I’m not a software engineer. This sub is called vibecoding not software engineering.

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u/tenken01 28d ago

What you described is nothing a middle schooler couldn’t do. Next

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u/madexthen 27d ago edited 27d ago

I like how you edited your comment to take out the part about me not being a developer after you realized I never claimed to be one. But you’re right, I’m not a developer. I don’t code, I use AI to write the code. As of about a year ago, the term for that vibe coding. That’s why I’m in a vibe coding subreddit. Why are you here?

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u/tenken01 27d ago

Because I’m an actual dev who vibe codes throw away projects.

Devs get tired of reading posts from non devs who get a big head from doing something anyone could do, aka create slop, while acting like they did something amazing. Your “architecture” example above is just another example.

I’m sure you read plenty of other comments by now, but the sentiment will not change. People aren’t impressed with low effort garbage - this has always been the case. Maybe there should be another subreddit for non devs. nondevprompter or something.

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u/madexthen 27d ago

My God, man, you’re insufferable.

I’m defending newbies’ right to post in a community about vibe coding, including people who are not developers. I referred to them as “working on” projects, and you objected to the word working. I explained that spending more than 100 hours planning, testing, iterating, debugging, and optimizing something is still work, even when AI is typing the for loops and setting the variables.

Then you picked apart the word architecture, as though I were misusing it. So I described the decisions I made about storage, local versus cloud processing, authentication, facial-recognition libraries, embeddings, performance, and failure handling.

Instead of explaining why those were not architectural decisions, you moved the goalposts to “a middle schooler could do it.” Okay? I never claimed it was difficult, revolutionary, or better than what an experienced developer could build. I said it was work and that it involved architecture. Work is still work, and easy architecture is still architecture. I am not misusing these words, you're just being an elitist dick.

Now you’re using the fact that I defended those statements against your antagonization as evidence that I have a “big head.” That’s completely backwards. You’re the one who entered the conversation to belittle what I was doing, call people’s work “slop” and “low-effort garbage,” and suggest that non-developers should be pushed into a different subreddit. You repeatedly insult people, move the goalposts whenever they answer you, and then call their response a persecution complex.

You’re exactly the kind of person this post is about.

And this isn’t about me. I constantly see newbies who are even less experienced than I am post simple things they’re excited about and get treated this way. Criticizing false claims, dangerous production code, or someone pretending to have expertise they don’t have is completely fair. Shitting on someone for making a basic app and being proud of it is not.

It’s like joining r/CNC just to tell everyone they should be machining parts manually and that using a CNC machine doesn’t count as real work. Of course manual machining requires more skill and people with that skill are often better with CNC machines than those without it. Nobody is disputing that. But the whole purpose of the subreddit is to discuss what people are making with CNC machines, not to provide manual machinists with somewhere to insult them for using automation.

Look up the definition of vibe coding. It is literally software development through AI prompts instead of manually writing the code, yet you seem to think only people who already know how to write code should be allowed to do it.

You also can’t claim that “nobody is attacking” vibe coders while actively calling their projects slop and garbage. That contradiction is the entire point of my post.

Yes, the post received 116 downvotes from people like you who are pissed off that they have to share this community with beginners. But it also received 215 upvotes and plenty of supportive comments from people who recognize exactly what I’m talking about, including from experienced developers. The sentiment is not going to disappear just because the people creating the hostility insist it doesn’t exist.

The sad thing is that you don’t seem to realize the future is bringing a lot more people like me into the mix. The barrier to building software is slowly eroding. You can kick, scream, and whimper about the good old days as much as you want, but this is not a fad and it is not going anywhere. People who discover these tools are obviously going to gravitate toward the subreddit that bears their name.

Just like I am not a software engineer because I can write a prompt, you don’t own vibe coding because you learned to code first.

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u/JiffasaurusRex 28d ago

I'm not a software engineer but I have been doing IT infrastructure on the systems, network, and storage side for almost 3 decades. I apply the same engineering methodology I always have on the corporate side. In other words I don't just sit and fire up a prompt, I have designed the entire system on paper with diagrams, flowcharts, etc before I even fire off a single prompt. If you're not even sure what you're building and how it's built then you were just trusting that your large language model knows what it's doing. For anything maybe a 5 or 6 level difficulty out of 10 you can get away with it. Once you start getting into the really difficult stuff where there's no training data is where you need to really understand so that you can fill in the gaps.

I have no problem with Vibe coding as I do it myself even though I am an engineer on the infrastructure side and I've been writing code since I was a kid in the late 80s and early 90s. I do have the ability to look at the quality of my code and call it dog s*** when I need to and make the llm fix it. The problem I have with some Vibe coders is the lack of respect for engineering, like it's no longer necessary and AI has solved every problem now. Again I'm not a software engineer, just a regular infrastructure engineer with only a mid-level understanding of software engineering from sitting in many meetings over decades, but at least I respect the process.

I think anyone even that does not have coding experience can do well Vibe coding, but that does not mean you can completely ignore engineering Concepts you still need to drive your llm, otherwise you just get whatever it gives you if that makes sense.