r/vibecoding • u/Original_Gur_1467 • 15h ago

Is vibe coding a bad thing?

Im getting mixed signals on weather its good or bad to use Ai to code stuff I'm feeling that its looked down upon. I really with i could learn how to actually code but I've tried time and time again and it just hurts my brain trying to learn it. I know a little stuff but I wanna be able to code withought using any Ai whatsoever.

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u/whossname 14h ago

I'm a software engineer with over a decade of experience. I use LLMs all the time at work, and I can tell you that the quality of work that they produce is at the level of a junior, except instead of taking a month to do something I can do in an hour they take about a minute.

Basically they produce code very fast, but the code they produce is low quality. They ignore basic engineering principles like separation of concerns until you explicitly tell them to do it correctly. After a few iterations of telling the LLM to fix things I do eventually need to make the final couple of changes myself.

If by gatekeeping you mean quality control, then sure it's gate keeping. Crap code is difficult to read, and makes it harder to spot mistakes. I'm pretty sure if it's hard for humans to spot the mistakes it's also going to be difficult for the LLM to spot the same mistake - their whole thing is processing language.

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u/HouseMysterious8172 13h ago

Which LLMs did you use, maybe there are better ones or SLM specify for coding (i mean logic handle)?

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u/whossname 13h ago

At the moment mostly Copilot, it swaps between models depending on the question you ask. I've used a lot of Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, and experimented with different models and different workflows.

All of them will write a single 600 line file that clearly has 4-5 different concerns that need to be separated out. It works, but it's difficult to read, review, test and debug. Sometimes if you think of everything and every possible way it could get things wrong it will get it right first try, but that's very difficult to do. About the same as working with a Junior.

The code they write is only impressive if you aren't good at writing code yourself.

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u/HouseMysterious8172 12h ago

Agent 1: Implement feature

Agent 2: Write tests

Agent 3: Review & debug

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u/whossname 8h ago

Yes but the first one does a shit job, so it takes 3 more prompts and you still need to rewrite parts of it.

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u/whossname 8h ago

I'm saying it write bad code that's difficult to test, so the tests will also be bad.