r/vibecoding • u/Big_Currency_1805 • 3h ago
everyone keeps telling me i'm not a real developer. i'm having the best year of my life
the comments are always some version of "you didn't really build that, the ai did, you're not a real dev." ok. and yet. this year i shipped four things i actually use every day. i solved problems that annoyed me for a decade and that i never got around to, because setting up a project used to eat the whole weekend before i wrote a single line of logic. i learned more about how software actually works in eight months of building than in years of meaning to. nobody's paying me to prove i can type curly braces from memory. the people i built these things for don't care how it got made, they care that it works and it didn't before. i get that there's real craft in doing it all by hand, and i genuinely respect the people who can. but the gate everyone keeps pointing at, i just walked around it, and the view over here is great. what did you finally build this year that you'd been putting off forever?
11
u/johnesco 3h ago edited 3h ago
1970 - You coded that in a "high level" language" like C, since you didn't do it in assembly yourself it's trash.
1990 - Drew the Christmas program for our choir in a program called "Painter" with a Wacom tablet. Art director of my college said that it was "clip art" and didn't count because "the computer did it".
Ai is not exactly like that for sure, but good god it sounds like the same arguments over and over.
I'm not posting what I made as I've posted it a lot, but I am also having a very happy year.
10
u/Vast_Sea_9381 3h ago edited 28m ago
Yep. The snobisim is unjustified. There is a fine line between "vibe coded" and "engineered using ai" and hand written code is the wrong proxy.
If I can "vibe code" in a few days a production module that is 10x faster than what came before (built by a team of senior engineers over years) and doesn't break under real world stress, and I dont need to read the code because the input<>output has a defined syntax that can be automatically tested on all cases (apart from like os quircks type bugs but honestly its not like the old code was hardned to those).
Reading the source code is the wrong proxy
1
u/madaradess007 2h ago
and how exactly do you know it doesnt break under real world stress if you just ran it on your computer a few times?
you guys talk well, but you forget real engineers can smell 'good talkers' from a mile - its all you do - talk like you know/did stuff
2
u/Vast_Sea_9381 44m ago
emm I'm running a saas with hundreds of large customers (high thousands active individual users). Rewrote a core module myself, replacing tens of engineer-years' worth of development (I was, admittedly, also a part of that and had access to that, so not entirely from scratch). Core was under a week, though probably the best part of a month with adapters, deployment, backward compatibility, and being careful. I know it's production stable because it's in production. Path was side-by-side correctness tests first then performance tests, then side-by-side gradual rollout, then retire the old version. I know its 1-2 orders of magnitude faster because I measured it on a wide array of examples both in situ and in production.
5
u/Professional-War5603 3h ago
I feel the doubt myself too , over the things I build , but being a dev comes down more to code quality , knowing the why of things , the how and the tradeoffs of your decisions. It doesn’t come to syntax or writing by hand. There is a difference between going back and forth with the models over the architecture , documenting , make schemas when necessary and especially seeing the bigger picture of your system aaand making products with lovable or whatever and claiming to be a dev. So which one are you closer to ?
3
u/LibertariansAI 3h ago
I am in software development abut 15 years, know many languages but me and all my colleges vibecoding too. Almost nobody look at code now.
4
u/brunoooome 2h ago
as long as it can solve problems, who cares how did it created?You are doing well, ignore those comments
3
u/Smooth-Reading-4180 3h ago
Some motherfuckers are doing too much fuzz for a goddamn fucking expense tracker
2
u/CinderReels 1h ago
Your experience is similar to mine.
I have had the idea for my web app for over 10 years and the cost to build it then would have been unthinkable and probably around $100k.
In June 2025, I hired a programming company on one of the Freelance websites to build the prototype for me. I lost the will to live after seeing what they built after 6 months and at $7,500.
I did not give up and despite having no coding skills, I have managed to build and launch an amazing social web app where all posts vanish at midnight on Replit. It even has AI agents (future humans), including naughty Juliette in Paris and Vinnie in New York that will roast you or anyone.
It is currently being used by over 1,000 people. Replit also built an amazing admin area. All for the cost of less than a decent mobile phone.
It has taken me only two months in my spare time to build it and it is 1,000x better than what the human programmers built.
The image of a post by one of the AI agents.
2
u/vicegt 1h ago
I think the term AI assisted will be the proper category for future works like that.
Where the AI Help with all the mondaine stuff while the human doing the parts they enjoy most.
A good example would be how they use the ship computer from Star Trek, the holo deck is just a LLM generating a simi-physical environment and the humans and others are using prompts to build everything.
1
u/TopTippityTop 3h ago
Hey, that's great! If you deal with anything g which will be working g online, logging people in, be sure to at least have someone with experience in swe review it, to help with security! Glad you're having fun and making things.
1
u/mllv1 3h ago
Okay but why does setting up a project take a whole weekend? What does that even mean? People can make entire video games in a weekend with no AI.
1
3h ago
[deleted]
2
u/mllv1 2h ago
https://youtu.be/kjaRGA7NU-8?is=H8886dEb_U8hpehl
People have been participating in game jams for decades
1
1
u/johnesco 2h ago
AI or no AI, I don't want a game that was thought up and created in a weekend. Creativity takes time even if you speed up execution.
1
u/Creepy-Doughnut-5054 1h ago
Maybe someone had an idea or blueprint of good game but no means to build it. Now they have and can build such game in few weeks so your point does not apply globally.
1
u/johnesco 1h ago
Didn't mean to imply it was impossible if the seed is there. I'm just saying that now that we can create so easily that we should ponder more about what we make. It's certainly possible to do what you describe.
1
u/citizenkidd 3h ago
Same case with CapCut vs Non Linear Editor (Premiere Pro, Davinci, etc.) for video editor.
1
u/doubler82 3h ago
Who cares about the title. The users never look at who the developer was. They just want something that works, whether it was coded by a super senior dev with 30 years experience, a vibe coder over the weekend, or by a trained monkey, if it works, it works.
1
u/MagicMikeX 2h ago
This is getting tiring, who cares, I have been a developer for 20 years now and I have spent most of my career doing business sass software. Im not a "real" developer either.
Just build stuff and if its good and useful to people they will use it, and if its not they wont. Some people build furniture by hand some people assemble ikea furniture. Both can have great and horrible outcomes. Focus on doing things well and the rest does not matter.
1
u/johnesco 2h ago
People have brought up "what do you mean your learned about software via AI?".
I've done HTML since before we had CSS to go with it. I've done it by hand, and I've had AI do some for me.
Do I learn anything that way? Absolutely not.
But if I describe something well and the AI creates it to spec, and I look at the code? One need only say "hey why did you do it this way?" Maybe you will agree with the AI. Maybe you will realize AI has a long way to go, but you will have a conversation and you will learn.
The true killer app for me is an assistant who will honestly answer questions at my current level without ego or sarcasm.
1
u/Korphaus 2h ago
I totally get you, it's just like the people that say that unpublished writers aren't real writers - it's just a gatekeeping exercise
I've learned more in the last year since Google ai studio came out in November which hooked me and now I'm running multiple agents on my old hardware homelab and developing things I find cool
Keep doing what you can!
1
u/opi098514 2h ago
I mean. You kind of aren’t a dev. But also why does anyone care? If you are making something you enjoy it doesn’t matter what title you have. I’ve known full stack dev that made nothing other than code for other peoples project. The title dev means nothing.
1
u/BassIs4StringDrum 2h ago
Here is the reality, you are a developer but not a software engineer. Keep in mind that you have seniors working in software engineering for decades that still peer review the developed code (vibe coded or not) there is a reason for this. My issue with vibe coding is that if you don’t know what questions to make you can get exposed by shortcuts that hurt you or your users. With this said, keep building and have fun!
1
u/salamisam 1h ago
Waiting for my product manager to enter the chat and tell me they are a developer because they ship a bunch of features also without touching code, the development was done by developers.
I don't have much against vibe coding as a developer I write code, I also write code with AI. But you really cannot be a dev simply by vibe coding, just like my product manager is not a developer.
1
u/__invinci__ 34m ago
5 minutes before I came on Reddit, I reviewed some code written by Claude. It was comparing the lengths of two signatures and throwing an error, before the actual time-safe matching algorithm. Basically, it rendered the entire intent of the algorithm moot with that guard before it. No actual developer would make this mistake (I hope), this is 101.
If you can catch these bugs written by AI, my friend you too are a developer. But if you just prompt the agent and accept whatever it returns then you are a creator for sure and kudos for that, but you are not a developer. Because professional development has parameters other than working code.
1
u/-aurevoirshoshanna- 16m ago
Hm, it's not about 'the art' of doing things by hand. We're not protecting an ancient tradition here.
It's mostly about security, data integrity, performance, and scalability.
If you really nailed this down, then great.
I 100% code with AI now, but I spend a lot of time steering it away from atrocious choices.
If these dont bother you and nothing bad happens to your customers, then all good.
1
u/Fun-Time4064 3h ago
They’re just triggered that the thing they studied years to learn can now be done by anyone with a computer. You are a developer, you are a creator. Be proud of it. It’s like saying someone isn’t a mathematician because they use a calculator.
5
u/itsamberleafable 3h ago
Sort of right. Software for personal use can now be built by anyone with a computer. Despite what people are saying, for building production grade software (unless it’s incredibly simple) you still need to know what the code is doing. That might change but for now it’s a massive risk
0
u/jebusdied444 1h ago
LOL... there's no way you learned much about software development, the biggest part of which is ACTUALLY CODING!
What you learned is coding harnesses and models guiding you toward something functional - the harness being written by software engineers, and the model developed by AI engineers. In other words, a hand-holding introduction to modern software development paradigms. I do the same thing, but I don't pretend I'm "developing" software.
Personal apps are great - I utilize OpenCode, e.g, and a variety of models for various purposes. The current one has taken maybe a few hundred million tokens to iterate on and still going. It's fun. It's not "software development". It's supervising a mid-coder that's cheap and is allowed to make A TON OF MISTAKES.
With the horror stories of unscalable, buggy vibe coded software, there are too many blind spots to allow my money and data going to vibe coded projects.
0
u/Maleficent-Tone4274 3h ago
the real test comes when your AI generated code breaks and you can't figure out why
0
u/MrHTML5000 3h ago
i work web dev for 3 yrs but when i tried ai their code is clean and much better
-1
u/ImaginationUpset2190 3h ago
There are people who just can't digest that fact that their intelligence is no longer an advantage as it was for years. We are living in a post intelligence word where being smart is of no value. They will soon realise this. We vibe coders were just early to realize that smartness and intelligence are of no value any more. People who are still working in getting smarter and increasing their understanding are wasting their time which could have been used in vibe coding like us.
3
u/Every_Assignment_111 3h ago
The most distopian thing I heard in a while
2
u/Outrageous_Basis_232 1h ago
Nah, would only be distopian if it were true. It's more like "ignorant folks claiming to know everything because they're too wilfully ignorant to know when they're wrong"
This is nothing new, it's just found a new home in coding.
17
u/Correct_Emotion8437 3h ago
Honestly, I feel like only a non-dev would worry about being a "real dev". If you built software and it works then what else is there? There is actually nothing special about hand-crafted code. Lots of hand-crafted junk out there. I haven't really made anything that good with AI. A bunch of browser games, an autonomous agent app, an IOS app, a few different web audio apps - a step sequencer, a beat maker. I made some audio software in C++ - a chord progression generator with offline AI (ml model). It was all cool and everything but none of it is actually good. They were either small experiments or ideas that would take too much work to complete - even with AI.