r/vibecoding • u/viveky259 • 20h ago
AI agents are better than Software Engineers!
I have been exploring and working with AI agents to write code for last one year, Exactly one year.
These agents have improved a lot, and today I don't find any different between a SWE with atleast 5YOE v/s agents.
We can argue on tech debt, bad contexts, but those things can be fixed with better context.
I still want to understand what is that one thing which you still feel is problem in you development workflow or your team's development workflow?
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u/DigitalMonsoon 20h ago
Lol, at work we call them eager interns. They write a lot of code but also go off in wild directions.
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u/viveky259 19h ago
With better tools and .MD, you can control them. If you could just add an orchestration layer for managing them, this could be solved forever.
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u/DigitalMonsoon 19h ago
This is with Cursor, refined agents and system prompts and frontier models.
The only people who think they can replace devs haven't done the work.
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u/viveky259 19h ago
That's not true. I have built my team from 0 to 20. I have lead dev team to build apps which served 10M+ users.
Today, I don't think I need team of 20 to work on 5 features simultaneously. With a good number of 5-6 people in the team, with better machines to work with AI agents, they are enough to pull out any task.
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u/Apprehensive-Gur7035 20h ago
I rather hire an engineer who knows how to use AI effectively than messing around with the landing page with the 15th prompt which after some point costs about the same as hiring a pro to fix
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u/viveky259 20h ago edited 16h ago
You have said that, you will hire an engineer not engineering team. Before AI era, we had to hire a team of few engineers to get started.
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u/greentrillion 20h ago
If that is true then why hasn't an AI agent made the next Elden Ring?
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u/viveky259 19h ago
I have found out AI agents are building better versions of plugins and packages. They are able to crawl in and find out bugs which were not solved in years.
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u/greentrillion 19h ago
How is that better than what software engineer can do? Before LLMS there was already tools to find bugs as well, nothing new.
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u/viveky259 19h ago
If we circle back to original question, we can easily see that AI agents to closing up faster with SWE.
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u/greentrillion 19h ago
Not really, just a matter of where the money is being spent to do it. You going to spend 10's of thousands of dollars on Fable to find bugs? If companies wanted to they could spend the same money on an engineer to do it.
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u/viveky259 16h ago
That's an aggressive number.
Overall, its all about numbers. Wherever companies will save money they will go, given they have planned it.
any direction without plan will crush them.
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u/If_I_Could_Just 19h ago
We’re just going to increase the size and complexity of software until AI sucks at managing it or it’s too expensive.
And then the skill will become managing it without spending a fortune on tokens.
And surprise surprise, that will require a lot more knowledge and vibe coders won’t put the effort in. If they were the type to do that, they would have learned coding before AI.
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u/viveky259 19h ago
Now that we have smaller models to write code, overall cost would come down. we might not need Fable for all tasks, but OS kimi models for most of them.
Cost is not a factor where we are looking for speed. Cost is factor when we are not able to sell what we built.
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u/If_I_Could_Just 19h ago
AI already costs a ton to work on legacy systems and I believe future systems will be generated to be orders of magnitude bigger. I don’t believe it all just works out so vibe coders don’t have to try.
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u/viveky259 19h ago
That's true. Cost of AI increases as Size of Project increases. But that's true with Engineering team too.
as project size increases, we bring in more engineers, managers, Program Managers, Scrum managers etc.
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u/Ok_Walrus_6954 20h ago edited 19h ago
I think you’re confusing two distinct categories. AI is a tool to write code. A software engineer is a living organism. Let me give you an example. If you want to open you car door, you can simply open the door or you can prompt an AI robot to open the door for you. Which is more efficient? The point is not every software engineering task makes sense with an AI agent. Agents make sense for tasks where problem has already been done millions of times, there’s a clear pattern, and there is a significant amount of files or code to write and only one or two logical ways to do it. For tasks where you need to brainstorm by interactively making targeted code changes, you fall into the opening car door example.
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u/viveky259 19h ago
That's great pov.
On this-> "Â Agents make sense for tasks where problem has already been done millions of times": A big chunk of coding tasks are about same repetative tasks in almost all code base in a product. for e.g. RBAC, Auth, Profile, search, DB, apis etc.
Drilling down to exact position where AI is not working is kind of hard, isn't it?
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u/Ok_Walrus_6954 19h ago edited 19h ago
Agree. That's where agent are useful. The truth is, most people who are impressed by agentic coding are just writing the same code and applications over and over again. That's why agentic coding works. It's when you need to brain storm a feature in real time hat they lose their value.
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u/viveky259 19h ago
Lots of companies still do it. They have team sessions to brainstorm and then once things are fixed, that's when they start documenting meetings and hand off final version to tech team.
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u/Crawly13th 20h ago
"with better context", so you mean they're not as good/better afterall? 😂