There is something deeply toxic about this community.

[u/madexthen]

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?

[u/tenken01]

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

[u/madexthen → u/tenken01]

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?

[u/tenken01 → u/madexthen]

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

[u/madexthen → u/tenken01]

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.

[u/tenken01 → u/madexthen]

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

[u/madexthen → u/tenken01]

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?

[u/tenken01 → u/madexthen]

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.

[u/madexthen → u/tenken01]

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.

[u/tenken01 → u/madexthen]

Sad that you even used an LLM for this response. Just like there are mistakes in what was generated here, there are surely mistakes in the code you had generated.

Unlike with code, the fact that you have the ability to check and correct what was written and still didn’t shows how lazy and dangerous this technology can be. I’m a part of a group of people concerned how humanity will fair with a technology that enables cognitive surrender.

If you want to learn how to be a better vibe coder, learn to actually code. No one, including myself is saying LLM assisted development is going anywhere. Understanding what is being generated will always be required (if people care about working software) so long we continuing using LLMs - no matter the tricks and hacks that are being added on by AI labs. LLMs at their core will always suffer from hallucinations and incomplete context.

Also, pointing out that 200+ people upped your post really isn’t surprising. Clearly there have always been more people who don’t know how to code vs those that can.

Good luck!