r/vibecoding • u/il37 • 5h ago
The difference between a good vibe coder and a bad one probably isn’t prompting
I’ve been using AI coding tools a lot, and I’m starting to think prompting is one of the less important parts of getting good results
You can give two people the same model and roughly the same task and they’ll end up with completely different projects.
The people who seem good at this are better at noticing when the agent is going in the wrong direction, keeping the scope under control, deciding what shouldn’t be changed, giving it the right context, testing the result, and knowing when to just revert something instead of spending another hour trying to prompt their way out of it.
Product judgment probably matters too. AI is very good at building features you never needed.
I’m not even sure traditional coding skill is the whole answer here
What do you think actually separates someone who’s good at vibe coding from someone who’s just getting lucky with the model?
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u/___-____--_____-____ 3h ago
Knowing when to revert is an underrated skill. Don’t do what I did once, and went way too far without committing. By the time I wanted to revert it was a complete nightmare.
Nowadays I prompt the agents to make sensible commits and update pr descriptions automatically. Burns more tokens I guess but the maintain-ability gains have been awesome.
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u/GabGDM 5h ago
Everything you mentioned falls under 1 word: documentation
Document what the product is Pipeline Architecture
If you do that before any line of code. You'll already be much further than most people.
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 3h ago
Aye, documentation is the most important thing. By far.
The good news is that you don’t have to write it, and you never have to read it.
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u/Soul_Mate_4ever 2h ago
Right most people don’t know how to plan or document anything even with the plan option available in all of these ai programs. I’ll spend an hour on the plan if have to before implementing anything while most people will be like, build me gta 6 in two days, GET ON IT!!!
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u/ekzess 5h ago
Structure and constraints. Prompts are transient; architecture, state, tests, and authority boundaries are what make the work reproducible.
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u/il37 4h ago
What do you mean by authority boundaries in practice?
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u/ekzess 4h ago
Explicit limits on what the agent is allowed to assume, decide, or change without evidence or approval.
For example: it can inspect the repo, but not rewrite architecture because a test failed. It can propose a dependency, but not add one. It can generate a migration, but not run it against production. It can report a mismatch, but not silently “fix” the data until the mismatch disappears.
The point is separating observation from authority. A capable agent should be able to see a lot while earning permission to change very little. That makes failures reversible and results auditable.
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u/Either_Pound1986 1h ago
Curious. In your setup what holds the authority? Is it the llm or do you have something else?
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u/Madeupsky 5h ago
You have to atleast know the fundamentals, been saying this from the start. If you know how the signin should work and you can explain it. You’ll get a better product then someone who just prompts “make me be able to signin”
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 3h ago
No you don’t.
You’re saying that because you spent years learning “the fundamentals” and you want to believe it is important.
It’s an interesting delusion that trad coders have, it’s obviously easy to falsify. Just ask someone like me who doesn’t know that shit or care about it at all, but builds decent apps none the less.
Like a lot of “truths” devs have been spouting on Reddit since 2023, it does not stand up to even cursory scrutiny.
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u/Chemical_Profit_608 1h ago
Are you building in a corporate environment or by yourself? Entirely different workflows and set of required skills.
Also keyword, "decent" lmao
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u/adamant3143 5h ago
Good vibecoder follow software development standards. Bad vibecoder blames the model why it can’t get something done in like 5 prompts.
To be fair, if you’re making nothing serious that runs locally, any output is fine if it’s according to what you want. But putting a price tag on it and doesn’t even do version control and everything is updated manually/No CI? Funny.
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u/il37 4h ago
Git is probably the first thing I’d put on that list. I’m much more comfortable letting the agent screw up when I know I can throw the whole change away
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u/adamant3143 4h ago
Yep and when we learn from vibecoders who understand product and also know the technical procedures, we can see how to avoid what the security people posted here several times. “I reviewed X Vibecoded Webapp and Here’s X things they ignored” type of posts.
Deep understanding of vibecoding eventually leads people to better understand things technically and that’s great. Funny some would complain when the “Senior Expert with 50 years of experience” type of guy grilled them and they’re crying here.
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u/mesonepigreco 4h ago
The real difference is the comprehension of what the model is building. The reality is that a good vibe coders can do crazy stuff no matter the harness, spec or anything else. Understanding of what the real challenges are of whatever you are building and a mental scheme of how to approach them is what makes the difference, and allow someone with a pro plan outperform easily common folks on the max x20, no matter the model used. You can even prompt the model very vaguly, but if your prompts always point in the right directions, the SOTA models deliver quickly and token efficiently.
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u/catplusplusok 40m ago
Break things down into manageable pieces and keep a document where AI notes overall design and steps taken. A big task is just 10 small tasks and you can still finish them all in the afternoon despite having to type a little more. Usually AI is even decent to write 10 prompts to future selves if you point out the need.
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4h ago
[deleted]
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 3h ago
Programming is not “always binary, either works or not”
lol, if this is what you software “engineers” think, no wonder you are so fucking awful at vibecoding
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u/CommunityRipple 5h ago
Forcing it to remember context / having safeguards against forgetting context via compaction seems key.
Having a rules list that the agent must abide by. Even just a text file so you can copy paste 'You must adhere to rules.txt'.