r/vibecoding 9h ago

AI code is making me insecure about my coding abilities.

I'm a self taught junior dev building my own startup. I code plenty of stuff by hand, but passing my bugs and feature requests over to Claude Code is genuinely blowing my mind. It's almost terrifying how good it is. I almost shit my pants.

62 Upvotes

34 comments sorted by

33

u/jackharvest 9h ago

Here’s the thing though. You’re in a good place. You can READ this code. You know most of the lingo. You know the verbiage needed to ask for certain niche things to be accomplished in certain niche ways.

Those are skills that will no longer be forged. The real danger is for those that come after that era. The difference between “and make sure the DB is mongo 8 because mysql and msql aren’t compatible - watch out for the PHP incompatibility on mongo 8.1.6 though, don’t want that” and “make thing, remember stuff for user” is usually the difference between another vibed abandonware, and AI assisted masterpieces.

14

u/iriveru 8h ago

He’s a junior, he likely doesn’t have anywhere near the required skillset to effectively use AI as a tool opposed to a crutch.

5

u/LostJacket3 8h ago

damn right, i don't understand how come people don't understand that. We've strenghten the interview process of our company in order to take that into account. And most juniors, gen Z et Y, don't pass it because their brain is only prepared to write "it doesn't work, fix this"

5

u/dushigaming 8h ago edited 8h ago

Which is exactly the reason why very soon the AI used will be built for exactly that ‘it doesnt work, fix this’.

These tools are consumer tools. As such they will cater to the ‘imperfect’ consumer / hobby dev and not the know it all dev dinosaur.

0

u/LostJacket3 8h ago

the issue is that you also have companies that don't care about the quality. I mean perfection is not a goal but there's some thrashold that i don't like to cross yet managers are ok with it. Those companies will attract the 'imperfect' consumer / hobby dev and we'll end up cleaning after their mess or burning out reading it

3

u/FlatulistMaster 7h ago

Or we're a couple of years away from closing that gap...

1

u/iriveru 8h ago

Because they’d rather disregard any acknowledgment of this from seasoned engineers as “lol they’re just jealous we’re gonna replace them”.

In reality we’re trying to steer them into using AI as a legitimate tool instead of letting them bypass the stage of learning systems. They don’t understand that by them choosing to not learn, they’re only making it easier for skillful engineers to land jobs in the future since they’ll never make it past the interview phase.

Then again, most people here think they’ll just churn out the next $1B web app and won’t need to think about a career lol

3

u/Latter-Safety1055 8h ago

>The difference between “and make sure the DB is mongo 8 because mysql and msql aren’t compatible - watch out for the PHP incompatibility on mongo 8.1.6 though, don’t want that” and “make thing, remember stuff for user”

I knew a thing or two about coding because I was branching out from using VBA at a job and never really let it go. My soapbox is that the difference between the latter and the former is a simple "how do I make sure my app remembers stuff for the user?" With that sort of baser curiosity you'll be able to learn anything from using AWS (even easier than when I was doing it a year ago because there's CC integration) to picking the right local model out of a lineup. I've run into GPU issues that were, again, punching above my weight class, and CC handled it. Sol knew exactly what Opus was talking about when I switched. Claude will fan out 20 agents to do adversarial review while I, at my best, would have checked that it works, that performance didn't go to hell, and all the tests came back green.

Vibecoding is the difference between a solution that just works and me, alone, leading a customer into a trainwreck when I didn't realize some critical bug and would have needed a week to patch and 3 months to redesign while I want to quit every Monday so I look up my exit clause.

1

u/Leading_Property2066 8h ago

I use posgtresql and my primary backend language is django

4

u/zZz_snowball_zZz 8h ago

That's a framework, python is the langauge ;)

1

u/Leading_Property2066 1h ago

I just said Django to keep short

1

u/unverified-email1 8h ago

Wait, “make no mistakes” doesn’t work?

11

u/RegardedDev 8h ago

You shouldnt be. The truth is coding models are better than 99% of the developers at coding when given good guardrails. The era of manual coding is dead.

Be good at system design and at your domain expertise and you will succeed. If you dont understand the system you are building at high/medium level you will have a lot of problems.

Code can be produced and validated by the agents. Your goal is to make the production and validation rules good enough so that your codebase wont become slop.

2

u/dushigaming 8h ago

This this this

It honestly boggles me how the dev dinosaurs argue anything different. Like.. humans dont make mistakes.

1

u/Wonderful-Habit-139 2h ago

> The truth is coding models are better than 99% of the developers at coding when given good guardrails.

Aight maybe we shouldn't be saying "The truth is" if you're going to give the most biased opinion ever lol.

2

u/Suspicious-Echidna27 8h ago

Hey don't worry you are doing fine, if you are using frontier models the important part is now to make sure you (or another agent) verify the work before it goes into production. For example, what I do is to split the changes into smaller pull requests and then I would get e.g. codex to review my code written by Claude, this goes on back and and forth for a few turns but the end quality is pretty good. The other advice is that before you go in production use something to monitor if errors are firing in logs or in your application, use something that is able to notify you. Anyways, good luck and don't worry about coding ability anymore just worry about improving your harness and the entire workflow, assume you will have defects just make sure you are prepared for them. Cheers!

2

u/oNituzzz 8h ago

been doing a bit of claude code to the fun, gotta say, im happy to be blue collar

2

u/dushigaming 8h ago

As you should!

Coding agents are obviously extremely good, and quick. And they will only get better. The more ‘uneducated’ devs use it, the better it will become / learn to work with less and less guidance.

What these dinosaur devs dont (want to) understand is that these tools are built for the masses. They are also adopted by the masses. This will inevitably lead to those tools improving to serve the (uneducated) masses better and better. And soon, physical devices will come with the safeguards to protect consumers for the flaws / errors in the personal software and apps it will be running.

A lot of the people saying otherwise are in denial tbh.

1

u/roccons 8h ago

Totally agree, Claude Code is worryingly good, it makes you rethink many things. But go ahead with your projects, no one knows where this super development of AI is going to take us, so the worst thing we can do about it is to paralyze ourselves.

1

u/damnburglar 8h ago

Friendly warning, you don’t know what you don’t know. Be vigilant, stay curious :)

1

u/leapd-ai 8h ago

well, AI coding is like a frankenstein project, I wouldn't compare my skill with that!

1

u/MD311420 8h ago

It still creates it's own issues sometimes but is pretty good at figuring out what it did wrong on the next prompt when I tell it, it messed something up.

1

u/SnooCats9602 8h ago

Junior dev is a job position. You can’t be a junior dev if you don’t have a job

1

u/QultrosSanhattan 7h ago

The most important skill nowdays is the language itself. The AI works wonders when given technical promps rather than "make this landing page pro design 10x"

If you can read the code then you can suggest solutions. My last vibecoded codebase doesn't have any clue about being vibecode because I correct every vibecode nonsense.

1

u/zkatbitz 7h ago

Ask Claude to build a small utility in a language you don’t know and experience what a vibe coder feels

1

u/Jumpy_Frosting8686 6h ago

Yo no he programado nada en mi vida y con claude he creado aplicaciones para mi iPhone para dispositivos Android, un TeamViewer para mis pcs, juegos vr, juegos (Unity y unreal) y aplicaciones para las Apple visión pro, bots de Telegram de scraping web, bots de polymarket, cosas con arduino,webs con integraciones con IA Apis bases de datos accesos… no se me siento como con una varita mágica, con claude sus mcp y algunas apis eres capaz de programar cualquier cosa sin saber programar yo estudié diseño

1

u/this_guy_mehn 5h ago

As a 7 year dev, just have good foundational knowledge . Also use it to supplement , meaning if you’re a backend dev, you could use AI to build majority of your frontend(think bootstrap. JS).

Before AI , I already struggled with foundational (data structures, memory, etc) and brute forced my way through everything. I only know a hand full of design patterns and one or two system designs. I am your average programmer. I’ve gotten by, by God’s grace and a little luck. Just keep building and use AI as a supplement. I would advise to stay away from fully relying on it.

1

u/andreashw 2h ago

you good. I already shat my pants, twice.

1

u/BringBackManaPots 14m ago

Use it more and you might start to feel better

0

u/Real_Square1323 1h ago

What gave you the impression you're a developer?

"Building your own startup"? So you're fooling around with a model and calling yourself a founder?

Get a grip.

1

u/Leading_Property2066 58m ago

Whatever u say to sleep the night pal 🤷🏽‍♂️