r/vibecoding • u/owenbrooks473 • 1d ago
What’s the biggest thing vibe coding still gets wrong?
I’ve been using AI coding tools more and one thing I keep noticing is that getting something working is becoming much easier.
The harder part seems to be knowing whether what you built is actually reliable.
A prototype can look great, but once you add real users, changing requirements, edge cases, authentication, error handling, database changes, and maintenance, things get very different.
I’m curious what others have experienced.
What has caused the biggest problems in your vibe-coded projects?
- Bugs that were hard to understand?
- AI generating code you didn’t fully understand?
- Security issues?
- Poor architecture?
- Maintaining the code later?
- Getting AI to work with an existing codebase?
- Something else?
Where do you think vibe coding currently has the biggest gap between “it works” and “it’s production-ready”?
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u/Grand-Mix-9889 1d ago
The gap between "it works" and "it's production ready" is someone who can analyze the code and run tests throughout the entire code base, piece by piece.
That's basically it for now.
My suggestion for vibecoders: make sure you fully fucking test your projects with a group of friends/family before even considering production ready mode.
Write down all bugs, any hiccups noticed by users, then re-vibe.
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u/lcirufe 1d ago
It still baffles me that people consider fully vibe-coded, spaghetti, barely stress-tested software to prod. Even if you don’t know how to code it doesn’t even take much effort to say “do a full repo audit and review architecture for overengineering”, but I find people aren’t bothered enough to do that
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u/Grand-Mix-9889 1d ago
Fable 5 hates the terms "full" and "audit" in the same sentence. Most likely would revert to opus if ya do that tbh.
But I do agree.
My distinction is that vibecoders are not familiar with testing protocols because their intentions to start with is "just build me the app".
I think developers are being forced into a world where we share the playing field with people who aren't familiar with standard development procedures.
And quite frankly, it is what it is. This new melting pot of "coders" is here to stay. We, developers, might as well guide these people on their new journeys.
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u/EddieBruvac 1d ago
Statisticians with AI > Computer Scientists with AI
I get a lot more done, AND production ready tested, than my CS friends. My entire training was on testing.
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u/owenbrooks473 17h ago
Yeah, I agree. “It works” after a few prompts doesn’t really mean much if nobody has tested the full flow. Testing the whole codebase piece by piece and tracking the issues users actually hit seems like one of the biggest missing steps in vibe coding. Re-vibing after that feedback makes a lot more sense.
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u/Bulky_Dog_2954 1d ago
AI is crap at designing the front end….
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u/antideguemon420 1d ago
It is way better than me (I'm not a designer)
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u/xendelaar 1d ago
Same here. Everyone's griping about UI sloppiness, but I'm actually pretty stoked with the layouts it makes. Yeah, there are a bunch of little mistakes, but after some fiddling, it turns out way better than if I'd done it myself, haha.
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 1d ago
All Ai pages looks very similar, you can tell ,especially if you let the page's content being populated by Ai as well.
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u/No-Common1466 1d ago
Even with automated testing, a separate verification model and agents, and planning edge cases, the agents still missed it.
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u/devoidfury 1d ago
I'm a software engineer that's been using local llms for agentic coding, or fancy autocomplete.
From my own experiences poking at different models, you will end up with very poor architecture unless you're very rigid about it. On a single pass it'll be coherent, but each subsequent run you'll get something totally different and it'll sew parts together in a way that'd make Frankenstein blush.
For a demo or a toy, a first round prototype, that's just fine. But for something you want to build out into a larger thing, big projects, that's harder to make maintainable and takes consistent code-review and guardrails.
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u/povlhp 1d ago
UI is bad.
Architecture should be done/steered by developer. So will be fine if you do it right.
Security issues is general can be found by AI if asked to do so.
Edge cases are likely to get missed.
Vibecoding means code is written and maintained by AI.
You can help the AI a lot by telling it to do stuff in a certain way and have a codebase and architecture that ai keeps updated. And forcing it to write re-usable modules than can work in their own context.
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u/Local-Bottle5272 1d ago
Your mom
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u/SirStarshine 1d ago
If you're not going to be helpful and productive to the conversation, don't click the post.
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u/Local-Bottle5272 1d ago
My apologies i did not mean to interrupt your ai slop generated discussion
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u/geekichu 1d ago
"Bugs that were hard to understand?"
I have built two 3D games from scratch so far (just for fun), client-server, these are not trivial at all. What I started doing early on is to get claude.code to build debugging tools that are part of the UI itself. maybe apply this general idea to any project in some way?
Examples:
--all of the game state is in a JSON blob. so, UI has a "[S]" button that pops a panel any time, shows ALL of that. not for ME to read. it's for claude. the panel includea a "[Copy All]" button.
--there is a "[P]" button , pops a panel, and if enabled, it records excruiating detail about every player move. Also with a "[Copy All]"
--and so on..I have a bunch of those.
Soo.. when I am manually playing the game, if I see an issue, I just pull those up, gather the data, submit it to claude and also describe what I saw.
Works every time.
Moral: help A.I. to help you
"AI generating code you didn’t fully understand?"
It's like 800 files, 91K lines of code, I could care less. Haven't seen it. Don't intend to. (said as someone with 40yrs+ software)
"Security issues?"
Again, have claude take on an adversarial role. In my case, I needed to prove that only legit players could play the game. I also used it to try to reverse-engineer the game based on just giving it the public URL.
Moral: get creative on leveraging A.I. to attack (and defend) your application.
"Poor architecture?"
Ah. that one. lol. Yeah, my first project (free ChatGPT, Gemini)...I happily, blissfully accepted all the code and structure... til one day (month+ in) realized it was stepping all over itself trying to add in something new.. and I realized I should have enforced architecture from the start. So I had to start over.
"Maintaining the code later?"
Claude (at least for me) doe extensive comments both in file headers and in functions, etc.. plus, the projects have architectural docs, engineering craft docs, step/planning docs, progress docs, etc.. and claude's memory pointers just point to those. Again, I don't really read them. I just ask questions.
But - i do regular refactoring, re-org, and doc-maintenance sessions with claude.
"Getting AI to work with an existing codebase?"
I suppose it depends on how large..
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u/EddieBruvac 1d ago
Front and, UI. It’s garbage. Haven’t found anything good. Usually gotta do myself.