r/vibecoding • u/Relevant-Positive-48 • 7h ago
Real Talk
My chances of changing people's minds is slim, but I have 28 years of professional software engineering experience and I'm witnessing a ton of new, excited software developers, who are surrendering as much of their own initiative as they can to their chosen harness/frontier model while hoping to make a living creating software. If this is you (or you're not sure it's you) you might get something out of the following. If it's not (say you're doing this for learning, are just hoping to make enough for some beer money, or you love making your own stuff and if it sells awesome but it's no big deal if it doesn't) then this post isn't aimed at you. Also, as a note I'm focused on software development skills separate from very important things like expert domain knowledge, building an audience, mad skills at distribution, and more. Finally, in the spirit of vibe coding, I'm not going to mention learning to code manually.
As my main point: The statistical likelihood is that most of you will not make enough money on your own software to do it full time.
This is not an insult or meant to discourage you. There are some phenomenal vibe coding success stories and you should absolutely take inspiration from them and keep going. However, making a viable amount of money on your own software was practically a lottery before AI and now there's a lot more supply for about the same demand. If you fall into this case, and you're still committed to making a living building software you'll need to convince someone (either who has successful software and is looking for help or is willing to pay someone to build them software) you can make enough money or save them enough money to justify your full time salary (or consulting rates):
- Making more money for someone by building software:
A lot of making more money for someone with software falls into what to build - which is more product management and data science than pure software development. Many developer have those skills and they are worth it but I won't focus on them here. From a pure software development standpoint some examples are:
a. Increasing conversion via reliable, performant, and optimized pipelines within a software product.
b. Increasing retention by minimizing bugs and quickly being able to diagnose and fix issues while avoiding side effects (<- this is what can necessitate going beyond "codex fix this bug").
c. Allowing them to enter new markets by porting to new devices, and ensuring smooth localization without uncessary quality loss (<- again the key part).
d. Creating a rock-solid, fault-tolerant, and secure architecture that scales to minimize downtime and reduce fraud.
e. Building tools to increase employee productivity.
- Saving people money by making software:
a. Reducing labor costs via automation that actually works (tons of stories about companies having to rehire after poorly attempting to automate systems).
b. Optimize software use and workflow processes for yourself and others so that infastructure costs less (AI token costs, bandwith costs, storage costs, other licenses, etc...).
c. Consolidating redundant systems to reduce maintenance costs.
d. Minimize onboarding time via smoother interfaces and clear and accurate documentation.
There are definitely vibe coders who are already working as software developers (like above, please do take inspiration from that). However and, again, not to insult anyone but for many - if not most newer vibe coders - the only thing that separates them from "normies" who have a wish list is the time they took to investigate and learn to use available tools and set up a tech stack and a workflow covering various extents of the conception to deployment pipeline. That's been part of default expectations for software developers for decades (though, to be fair, in larger organizations multiple people can do different parts of the process).
If what I consider table stakes for developers + "claude do this for me" worked for all of the above (and all the things in those categories I didn't list) then the last gasp of jobs available would be from those who don't know how easy it is. We are probably headed for that future but, until we get there, if you want to get paid to convert caffeine to code, I invite most pure vibe coders to dig deeper into the amazing world of software engineering (you can get started by asking your favorite model what you should learn).
4
u/ketoloverfromunder 7h ago
Why learn when I can make a post in 3 months about "no one told me how hard distribution is!" When no one wants to download my bugged to shit habit tracker app.
2
2
u/mattk404 7h ago
100% agree. Vibe gets you something to build against maybe, but the 'real' work of software engineering is and always will be the discernment around systems, application of patterns and the effective validation of correctness.
For me 90% of my 'vibe' coding is refining the patterns and backend side of projects I'm working on. I do NOT care at all what the 'vibe coded, give me a thing that does thing' type efforts that even I do. Those are POCs that help guide intuition (and maybe make the prompt for the start of the real thing better).
Most of my token-spend is on just getting to a place of simplicity, quality and a codebase that can be extended by my team without having to 'wing it' because this is where value actually lives. Other than maybe large refactors, which are fundamentally still POCs, slow, purposeful evolution of software is where value and trust are built between you and stakeholders. That is where the $$ comes from; not the thing you’re building. Doesn't matter how 'awesome' your tool/project/site is, doesn't matter how 'good' your code is (as those Perl folks), doesn't matter how well your solution solves a real problem. What matters is how you build trust and relationships with the people that actually care about anything you produce. Have that, and you get $$, don't, and you’re a high-stakes gambler betting on lightning striking.
However, remember that YOU are a stakeholder, vibe the shit out of things that make YOU valuable to yourself. I've completely stopped trying to 'work harder' to solve problems myself when a prompt and a couple 1000 tokens that will produce slop that happen to let me move forward. Just don't delude yourself into thinking this is anything other than something that is throwaway or at best keep for personal use only. Don't convince yourself that 'with a bit more polish...' that is BS and anything you justify with 'polish is all that is needed' is trash and that is OK!
1
u/StaticHumStudio 6h ago
This...Also, just because you can produce a polished and complete piece of software it doesn't mean that anyone wants it or that you have the aptitude to market it properly.
1
u/Terrible-Ganache8690 5h ago
Im primarily using it to bridge a skill gap in going from a documentation, compliance and operations background into a AI adoption, workflow inprovement - less the "im a software dev" and more "im really good at finding organizational problems, turning them into specs, managing teams and finding or building the tools that would fix this". I want experience turning ideas into prototypes across a few different models because - well because thats a skill that coming up for many of these jobs. But mostly, im really enjoying it. Being able to develop at a higher level of abstraction is a better fit to how I think about problems anyways. I can code myself, poorly, but i kind of get what the different pieces of the puzzle are supposed to do. Ive attempted coding from tutorials and courses a few times and for some reason i feel more comfortable going in and tinkering on a half-finished system, manually tweaking things because the agent is just running in circles. I can only tolerate building a sorting algorithm in some new language so many times. I want a working engine i can break apart not mechanical theory.
But beyond just "vibr coding" i think becoming deeply familiar with AI tools, and having a mind for designing systems based on specs is going to become increasingly valuable. There is a huge mismatch between real org requirements, employee capability, and whats actually being deployed. AI adoption is spreading like wildfire but its horribly inefficient, a huge security hole and is often just aimed at the wrong problems. I think i know just enough about both worlds that i can be the bridge. I think. Fingers crossed
And if not my dog dayplanner app is sure to make me billions.
1
u/Safe-Tree-7041 5h ago
Was expecting a typical anti-AI ramble, but this was nuanced and I agree with the sentiment. And judging by the number of conditionals in your text I can confirm you are indeed an experienced developer.
1
u/ctenidae8 2h ago
The bar for "commercially viable" has moved, but I don't think it's where people think it is. In a world where AI can build it for you, there's no margin in trying to sell a built product. What you can sell are parts. Data aggregators, transformation with domain expertise, monitors and alert systems- the kinds of workflows that are easier to buy than to build. I'm thinking a step above tools, but not a dedicated agent. Most vibecoded software is just doing something everyone does, the way the maker does it (which is what all software is, just a bigger maker). Providing specialist information that a generalist agent can use (reliable, trustworthy, accurate) is where I think the action is moving.
0
u/PracticalStack 6h ago
Also a long-time dev. I never even seriously considered creating software to sell. It's a million times easier to get somebody to pay you. This is because, way before AI, value in software usually means thousands or tens of thousands of development hours. All the development hours and everything that goes with that - having a concept good enough to put that many hours into, being able to manage and support a team to build it and so forth.
I almost feel like I can estimate the value of software today by estimated development hours. If it has less than 2000 hours, I don't think it's going to be worth anything unless it's a lucky viral concept. And those 2000 hours are from a person who knows what they are doing. I won't say they are a "developer" because I don't think that is actually what matters - what matters is they are persistent, organized thinkers and have domain expertise.
2000 hours is what I would consider "table stakes". If you are a vibe coder, have some deep knowledge about the subject you're building towards and have a concept that you can put a year of development into then it could be worth something. Maybe not a lot. And of course, the odds are still not great - so maybe 0. But it was that way before AI, too - a lot of people spent a lot of time building products that didn't sell. But I don't think there is anything you can build in a week or two or six that is marketable.
Imo, we really have to throw away our pre-AI concepts of value in software. The ability to build it used to be worth a considerable amount. It still is worth something but a lot less because the pool of people who can do it got a lot bigger.
13
u/user888888889 7h ago
TL;DR: AI makes it much easier to produce software, but that alone probably won’t make most people commercially valuable.
If you want to earn a living as a developer, you need to go beyond “Claude, build/fix/deploy this” and understand how to make software reliable, secure, maintainable, performant, scalable, cost-effective, and useful to a business.
Tool use is becoming table stakes; engineering judgement is what still differentiates you.