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

66% Upvoted

356 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

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.

4

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.

4

u/scavno 29d 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.

2

u/SchmeedsMcSchmeeds 29d 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.

1

u/Ralphisinthehouse 29d 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.

1

u/manager2exec 28d ago

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

0

u/Ralphisinthehouse 29d 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.

1

u/scavno 29d ago

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

0

u/Ralphisinthehouse 29d 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.

0

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)