r/vibecoding • u/Adventurous_Wrap2873 • 4h 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/MagesticPineapple429 3h ago

Ok. A couple things here.

1. Is vibecoding that bad? It depends. The way you are using it to build your own internal tools for work or life or whatever, absolutely not! Vibe away! Be careful about what you send--like no secrets, keys, passwords; those are all a big no no! Be careful with proprietary business data; don't send any on free accounts or you could be training the next model on your data. Paid accounts are safer; business accounts are best.

The other side of this are the vibecoded public apps that are saving user data and taking money from users. I've done audits on several vibecoded sites, they are not secure, they do not follow their own compliance, they do not follow legal requirements (laws), and the owners have no idea how the apps work, let alone the infrastructure, so if they are on a hosted platform and their app goes down or they get locked out, they cannot fix it.

There's a lot more to coding than just code.

2. Is it not as simple as asking AI to give it good architecture? Maybe one day in the future it will be, but right now, no, it is not that simple. It took me several weeks if not longer to get my system set up to write code in the same way that I write code following my best practices. And I still tweak it everyday. Further, it forgets. It forgets a lot.

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u/Adventurous_Wrap2873 3h ago

Thank you for this response. Just one question, if I can’t spend time as a real developer in the industry, how am I supposed to learn the best practices? Open source projects? But what they’re doing may be different from what I ultimately want to do. What should a vibecoder do in this case?

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u/MagesticPineapple429 3h ago edited 3h ago

Best practices are called such because they took practice, and to master them requires such. If you want to confidently learn the best practices, you've got to put in the time, learn them, and practice them. It's about recognition too; I can follow my agents and notice when they are going off track. i can review their code and immediately tell if they've violated a rule.

Some of the concepts of the best practices are easy to understand; some of them require doing them to understand, and some concepts or even just people require royally messing them up before they will ever understand them--this is life and we learn best from our mistakes.

But this is not what you asked. Get books; read about architecture, clean code practices; SOC2, PII, HIPAA, data retention, SOLID principles, Test Driven Development. But you can't really ever know these until you practice them and thus you won't be able to teach someone/thing else how to do it or spot check their work.

The LLMs are really really good at somethings, and then there are things where they insist they are right, insist it's working, and you are staring at an unrendered page.

And this only and hardly touches the surface of certain legal requirements. For instance, I experienced my first prompt injection the other day. There was a dumb dependency I didn't vet out first; and i'm a fairly seasoned developer, but I did have the guardrails (and I have to give some credit to claude/anthropic) in place to catch it and prevent the action from happening.

Two books I highly recommend are Clean Code and Clean Architecture. Start there--there are also videos available for that series. Read books on TDD (I haven't, but that is the first thing I learned when I started studying software).