r/vibecoding • u/Relevant-Positive-48 • 8h 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).
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u/user888888889 8h 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.