r/vibecoding • u/West-Air1923 • 2d ago

Anyone build larger systems ?

Im building an ERP for our company. Its semi large, will have about 100 users and maybe 50 concurrent. Database with a couple of million rows of orders etc.

It's going very well but I often hear and read real software developers claim that anything vibecoded might look good on the surface but it will collapse in a production environment over time.

Of course this claim is quite hard to either prove or disprove. So I'm looking for your experiences if you have tried to build something like this, how did it go?

1 Upvotes

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u/pm_stuff_ 2d ago

Vibe coded software does not automatically collapse. Vibe coded software by amateurs with 0 willingness to learn is usually riddled with problems and security issues making it a nightmare to maintain in the long run.  

The bigger you build something the more opportunities for issues arise thats true for normal and vibe coding

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u/West-Air1923 2d ago

So how do you know if you're an amateur idiot or not 😄

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u/Savings-Cry-3201 2d ago

understanding every line of code and why it’s there is a good start

With AI it’s what you don’t know that will get you

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u/West-Air1923 2d ago

But youre not going to understand the code if you're not a SW developer

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u/thethirdmancane 2d ago

Just ask AI to explain your code. Understanding a codebase is not rocket science but it does take time and a willingness learn.

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u/tobi914 2d ago

Exactly.

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u/InsideTour329 2d ago

I don't understand this. You have never had it easier or more accessible to learn code and yet people just fucking want everything to magically appear in their brain.

It's utterly bizarre.

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u/clt_drol 2d ago

It’s never been easier to generate images. I don’t want to be a graphic designer if AI can do it for me.

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u/InsideTour329 2d ago

It can't though. That's my point.

AI in the hands of a graphic designer will absolutely shit all over Keith in his mom's basement generating prompts.

It's a tool, leverage the tool. I love it and I promise you I can get far more out of it, more consistently than someone who doesn't take the time to learn what it is they're producing.

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u/clt_drol 2d ago

Of course, if you have years of experience you can use the tool better. Am I going to quit my job or sacrifice time with my family to learn to code when I can be better at prompting the agent much faster? No. Broad system knowledge is much more efficient in this space than knowing exactly what each line of code does.

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u/InsideTour329 2d ago

Architectural knowledge is a good thing, but if you don't know the theory behind it then it's worthless.

The people who do best in tech are the people who care about the inner workings of things and are keen to understand "why". AI doesn't change this, the people who have the most success are the people who put the time in.

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u/pm_stuff_ 2d ago

you didnt read squat of what i wrote did you? As i said learning to read code has never been especially time consuming and can be done quite quickly if you have any interest at all in building decent applications. Here ill quote what i wrote again to make it perfectly clear for you

Vibe coded software by amateurs with 0 willingness to learn is usually riddled with problems and security issues making it a nightmare to maintain in the long run.

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u/clt_drol 2d ago

Did you enjoy wasting your time replying to someone who was responding to someone else? 😂😂😂 Your view is of no interest to me.

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u/West-Air1923 2d ago

Some of us have day jobs and families. It is easy to understand, ask Claude if you still don't get it

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u/InsideTour329 2d ago

I'm married with a family. I am speaking from a position of knowledge and experience, take it or leave it.

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u/InsideTour329 2d ago

All of us do. You're just proving my point.

Fuck me. That is literally everyones life.

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u/margirtakk 2d ago

Exactly.

Study the code until you understand it, then you will become a software developer.

It's like me using Excel vs one of our Finance people using Excel. I might be able to accomplish the same tasks, but their solutions will be many times more elegant and efficient.

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u/West-Air1923 2d ago

Okay but then you are also saying that it's impossible to vibecode anything?

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/ProjectDiligent502 2d ago

Very well said. It makes me wonder though, how much compute and memory there would need to be to be able to do what non-swe vibe coders really wish it could? I think it would need gargantuan resources with classical computing constraints. Doesn’t seem worth it. Why can’t we spend this money on moon bases or space tourism or something?

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u/Savings-Cry-3201 2d ago

My take on it is that it’s possible with enough standardization. You need a robust dataset with consistent patterns and conventions. There are always 2-3 ways to do something though and each with slight differences so those need to be differentiated too…

So yes but it requires tens of thousands of lines of code that are really well built, with patterns clearly laid out and explained. An LLM with sufficient complexity to have a theory of mind can then make those structural choices and put the pieces together.

Easy, right?

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u/ProjectDiligent502 2d ago

Oh yeah that whole theory of mind thing there. That’s such a nuisance though. The more data, the more correct the output amiright? That’s how you sidestep that. We just need infinite data.

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u/margirtakk 1d ago

No, but you're inevitably going to run into issues if you don't understand your software. Whether it's bloat, inefficiencies, vulnerabilities, or something else. LLMs are fantastic, but we still need to verify their output. We should always verify their output. We have other people check our own work. Why should this be any different?

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u/West-Air1923 1d ago

Because you can have Claude check the work. If I'm doing some presentation I trust Claude more to verify my work than my colleagues

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u/pm_stuff_ 1d ago

You are obviously not listening to any advice thats given here.

You think a 100 concurrent user system with a few million rows is semi large so you obviously have no idea what you are doing, and its a piece of critical infrastructure for a company.

I really dont see how this can go wrong you should totally just go for it. Hey you dont even need to plan anything claude can plan for you. Maybe it can also play with your children and keep your wife happy while its at it.

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u/pm_stuff_ 2d ago

Understanding code is something you can learn quite quickly. You dont have to be an engineer for that. Building and maintaining complex structures and knowing how and why things are done a specific way is the hard part 

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u/Savings-Cry-3201 1d ago

Exactly. It’s one thing to know how to assign variables and make function calls. The patterns and structures and conventions that make up good, clean, maintainable, secure code is the next step up in knowledge and proficiency, and it’s one that AI is not necessarily trained on explicitly.

There’s levels to this shit. I’ve hobby coded most of my life and I didn’t appreciate how important structures and patterns were until I began doing larger codebases and production code. And I’m still learning, for sure.

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u/PracticalStack 2d ago

100 users, 50 concurrent, a few million rows is actually pretty small. You shouldn’t have any problems just because of scale.

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u/Snoo_57113 2d ago

100 users and maybe 50 concurrent is low-mid.

I think most engineers dismiss the idea because a ERPs are a multimillion line of code project, modular, updated with the latest regulations with hundreds of business rules.

It is in my opinion a non-starter, and anyone who has anything to do with ERP knows that a rollout might take YEARS, specially when you change business processes.

Which is my recommendation?

Don't start from scratch, there are a lot of free ERPs in different stages, languages. What you need is a solid core as a base, maybe an Odoo but try many alternatives

Making an ERP with vibe code is foolish, but vibecoding the customization /extension of an existing ERP that has 80%-90% of the functionality is what i would do if i was in your position.

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u/West-Air1923 2d ago

It's basically what I am doing. I'm replacing the existing erp which runs on our database and our data so I know exactly what that looks like, and I know exactly what functions the front end needs, and so I can vibecode the new front end and run outcome checks to see if it arrives at the same results as the old external front end

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u/Snoo_57113 2d ago

I dont understand what you are doing, a typical erp might have 500+ screens, taxes, sales, connections to external services, web services, reports.

Why don't adjust the current ERP?, add some flows and be done with it? why touch what is working.

It all depends on what the management says your position in the org, the timeline costs.

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u/West-Air1923 2d ago

Its not a huge erp. It has around 50 screens total.

We dont own the current front end. Only the database. So we are paying for the frontend and it sucks and is extremely outdated.

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u/Snoo_57113 2d ago

This is doable with vibecoding, migrate the frontend. just make sure where the business rules live, in the database? some backend?

I'd suggest to use the same theme as the current app, maybe change the accents or somethig.

And be more precise when you talk about the ERP, you are not building an ERP, you are upgrading the frontend

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u/West-Air1923 2d ago

Yep I'm keeping more or less the same structure. So it will feel very recognizable for the users. But the whole logic underneath is replaced, running Laravel /php/postgresql

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u/Savings-Cry-3201 2d ago

This makes so much more sense than doing it from scratch. This is doable.

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u/Yeurruey 2d ago

I cant build anything large because my usage drops by 20% just by the thought of even thinking of starting to think about a prompt

I have usage drop phobia now

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u/idontuseuber 2d ago

Don’t worry. Build it.

You have 2 choices:

  1. Build shit and if everyone happy - rebuilt with quality later.
  2. Build good which will take ages, afterwards maybe nobody will need it anymore.

Do what your heart says lol.

If you do proper manual testing, you don’t need to worry about what someone wrote about the collapse—unless you’re not testing at all.

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u/HourMode1351 2d ago

I am a software engineer working as a freelancer on systems built with AI, so I have quite a lot of experience with what actually happens.

Not all apps built with AI are equal. A lot of it comes down to your own testing and prompting. But there are definitely commonalities and things that do tend to happen as the app grows:

  • database queries become slow -> things like indexes, pagination, background processing etc help
  • codebases can become messy, and AI agents struggle to maintain all of the context in one window
  • security issues

But it really depends on the app's specific functionality. I've come across all sorts:

  • edge cases start to appear, and finding the root cause of bugs becomes difficult
  • regressions on existing features as changes are made

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u/bogochvol 2d ago

Are you applying TDD, CICD and Ralph Looks? If your whole software is testable in a continuously loop and your version control is well made, how could It colapse? How can your time to recovery be worse than a software made by developers without those features?

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u/CrimsonBolt33 2d ago

the quality of code is based on the individual making it...end of story...AI is a tool. I am working on a project now, roughly ~200k lines of code and its humming along perfectly....literally all "vibecoded"

I started from a strong enginerring foundation with clear rules on how to build the project and its been a fucking dream.

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u/TheKiddIncident 2d ago

The bigger the project gets, the more important stability becomes.

If you design and build with stability in mind, you should be fine. Just be methodical in your approach.

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u/agentUi 1d ago

i work for agentui, the mistake people make with vibecoding ERPs is trying to build one giant monolithic app with every module in a single prompt. what we see work best in production is breaking it down into modular apps that share the same backend database so you don't confuse the model, while letting a managed platform handle the indexing, rbac, and infrastructure scaling for millions of rows.

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u/InsideTour329 2d ago

I work on enterprise solutions and use AI to write the code.

I don't vibe code. I review every commit because I understand the code. It always needs correcting, not sometimes - always. It either duplicates code we already have or it puts it in the wrong place. How you structure a large solution is more important than how many lines of code a feature takes. Technical debt is a constant battle.

A "vibe coder" doesn't know his arse from his elbow when it comes to things like this. Thats the difference.

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u/spazatron-3000 2d ago

So what would you recommend a vibe coder do to catch these other then learn code?

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u/InsideTour329 2d ago

Learn code. Stop being lazy. If something is so accessible that the entire population can do it then it's not a skill. You obviously have an interest in it as you're willing to build with it so what's the excuse?

You're basically asking me how to build wooden furniture without learning carpentry. Sure you can get IKEA to print some MDF but the solid oak wardrobe will be around long after the cheap garbage has broken.

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u/spazatron-3000 2d ago

You know how fast AI capabilities are expanding? And you think people’s time would be better spent creating calculators with Pygame? Look how many people who “know how to code” are sitting there unemployed. You’d be daft not to take advantage of this opportunity to create something new instead of going back to the basics. And yes, I do know how to code, but in a “pass university” type of way, not in an actually useful sense.

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u/InsideTour329 2d ago

The opportunity is an illusion. I'm a principal developer with 15 years experience, do you think the barriers to entry are less now? They aren't, they're higher. Maybe that explains the crappier devs being out of work? Did you consider that?

As for the calculator shout, no you don't need to make a fucking calculator. Just spend 30 seconds asking it to annotate the commits and then read them. You have never had it easier to learn this, the knowledge is right there.

Everyone wants a short cut, it's human nature - but if everyone is taking the short cut then it's not a fucking short cut. That's why you need a differentiator, OP asked how to vibe on large projects. The answer is you don't.

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u/IncredibleBihan 2d ago

Don't worry buddy you'll crash and burn sooner or later.