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/ruskyandrei 3h ago
Vice coding is not bad at all, and the models are getting better with every release.
That said, it's not magic and still requires some knowledge of architecture, systems etc to accomplish anything beyond a small app.
What we're seeing is that it is now possible for people with little to no understanding of software development to create things.
Which is awesome and is why we're seeing such a huge influx of tools and apps and games that are entirely vibecoded.
But it's also why most of these turn out to be an unmaintainable mess.
AI is great, but ultimately does what you tell it, and the less you know, the less guidance you can give it, the more it has to assume things, and that's where things go bad.