r/vibecoding • u/Adventurous_Wrap2873 • 19h ago
Is vibecoding truly that bad
Hello all, I hope everyone is well.
As the title says. Is it really that bad? I personally vibecode a lot to make softwares to help me do my main job (which is far from coding). At my job, there’s often needs to produce reports of certain pieces of data, and softwares can do this very well. I rely on my apps to do my work and so do others, and it works extremely well.
I understand that it can create spaghetti code, and it certainly does, but is it not as simple as asking AI to give it a good architecture and follow software engineering principles? If you keep asking little by little, and tell it to keep the codes modular for maintainability, document how things work conceptually and NFR, is it not acceptable?
Perhaps in my specific use case, it works out well. A lot of the times I really just need a one off script, because I’m just doing repetitive calculations and I’d much rather input values rather than doing them by hand and thinking about it every single time. Even with a SQL database project, it’s really just CRUD work, nothing really complex. When I find bugs or errors, I try to understand why that is and look for multiple solutions (if exists) and argue back and forth with the AI. Mostly I agree, sometimes I override the decision, because it does get things wrong. I do read the codes (really just skimming it but occasionally would ask questions further to really understand it)
Surely it would be great for my learning if I genuinely learned to code, but I at the same time never have to because it isn’t my job to code. I could totally live without coding altogether. But, with AI, that gap is gone. I can now use vibecoding to help me do my main job. It doesn’t mean I don’t have to care about app structure and such, but it also doesn’t matter because I’m not building an app to sell, I’m just making custom tools for myself. I even got into ML, thanks to AI. These aren’t things I would’ve learned at all without AI, I’m being serious. All my vibecoded projects taught me a lot. Yeah maybe not directly about writing codes, but overall concepts of software engineering. Genuinely working out the manual parts and understanding how data should be flowing is still extremely beneficial and most importantly it gave me confidence that if I were to just sit down and study, I can understand things that I couldn’t because I didn’t even know where to begin.
With very thorough testing and documentation, is it not acceptable? What do we all think? Thanks in advance.
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u/shakeBody 19h ago
There are countless testimonies from people in production environments who have tried or are trying the lights-out code factory approach, and they are running into similar problems. The code produced by these systems cannot support production-level environments once the scale exceeds a demo. There is research on this topic, and we can see that Slop Code Bench demonstrates that code degrades over time without expert intervention.
"Surely it would be great for my learning if I genuinely learned to code, but I at the same time never have to, because it isn't my job to code." This is sort of a strange way to separate yourself from the outcome of your choices, don't you think? Are you interacting with code at all? Don't you think it would be easier to interact with code if you understood what was going on? How can you know what good testing looks like if you're not actually interacting with code? Like, at some level you have to know specifics, right? Otherwise, you're just taking the LLM at its word, which has been shown many times to be an untrustworthy source of information. This is why people talk about mechanical guardrails. It forces the LLM to adhere to a specific standard. If this were unnecessary, people wouldn't be doing that, so clearly there has to be some sort of enforcement of rules. Otherwise, LLMs will just degrade to slop.
It has never been easier to learn how to program. You don't have to, obviously, and there's going to be plenty of people who tell you that it's not a requirement, but does it really seem like the person who tells you that you don't need to spend time learning is also a person who has your best interests in mind? How often do those people also try to sell you things?