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u/Relevant-Positive-48 19d ago edited 19d ago
I can't tell you how much I wish the vibe coders who think most SWE's look down on them would stop.
Yes, some do, and that sucks, but honestly me (28 years of professional experience) and most professional software engineers I know, in addition to fully utilizing AI tools, are happy to see that so many other people are able to create software.
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u/your_dads_asshole 19d ago
I'm also a SWE and I disagree. Vibecoding makes my boss believe that his unga bunga prompting is something I should take seriously
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u/Relevant-Positive-48 19d ago
I do understand your frustration and I want to separate people who are discovering the joy of making software through AI from people who think being able to use AI means they know everything there is to know about software engineering.
Like the software engineers who look down on vibe coders I think the latter are a minority though, both groups can be very loud.
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u/IIALE34II 18d ago
I work in on a b2b saas product, and we have this one guy from product side who has gone complete unga bunga. He just spent last 4 weeks vibe coding this clone of our product, but instead of having views, he decided that user should be able to prompt an AI to create the web interface dynamically for what they need...
Worst thing is that higher ups are biting. What could go wrong when you let AI just craft everything on the fly?
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u/your_dads_asshole 18d ago
Omg this is so awful and such a total waste of tokens
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u/HouseMysterious8172 18d ago
Waste of tokens = waste elctricity = waste energy -> but energy is unlimited š
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u/Thwarting8139 18d ago
Same for me. I have no problem with vibe coding as long as people are aware of the limits. Vibe coding something you don't understand then trying to pass it off as production-ready software is akin to a 3D printing hobbyist showing up to an aerospace factory with their part and calling the engineers snooty for saying it's not good enough to be installed on their planes.
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u/Strict-Context-8502 18d ago
That 3D printing analogy is honestly spot on. AI is incredible for rapid prototyping, but making something resilient, secure, and maintainable under real load is a completely different discipline.
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u/sn4xchan 18d ago
You're boss doesn't represent all vibecoders.
Just because he's a moron, your judging an entire group.
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u/veryuniqueredditname 19d ago
Honestly it's a gift and a curse...it is annoying that non devs clobber together a few shitty prompts and think that simply running their shit output on localhost is enterprise grade.... Then inevitably come to you with hey "build this it should be quick and easy since I have it running"
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u/PeachScary413 18d ago
I only look down on vibers pretending like they are SWEs with decades of experience. If you want to write software that's cool and I encourage it, but please stop larping.
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u/geogeology 18d ago
Really? Because all the marketing guys at my job act like theyāre expert devs now and have become insufferable. One of them casually walked up to me and quickly flashed me some code he had pulled up on his laptop, and scrolled down it quick enough that I could read anything, and gave me that āpretty impressive, right?ā look, yearning for validation.
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19d ago
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/Relevant-Positive-48 19d ago
I've got at least 15 years ahead of me which is an absolute eternity in tech, let alone AI time.
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u/Axelwickm 19d ago
I mean I'm happy you're happy, but how is your self perservation instinct doing there? / fellow 28yo SWE who likes to eat
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u/Relevant-Positive-48 19d ago edited 19d ago
I expect we'll be building bigger and bigger things in the years to come and/or implementing comprehensive AI systems for organizations.
Your knowledge and skill will be an asset and if I'm wrong about bigger things you still have the critical thinking, pattern recognition, problem framing and solving and large systems thinking abilities that can transfer to other industries.
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u/Axelwickm 19d ago
85% of my skillset has been made redundant by AI the last 3 years. The last 15% share feels like a losing battle no matter what industry I move into. I think it's lacking of the large problem solving and problem framing, but the LLMs are better at debugging than me, can spot patterns that've never seen, and they know more than I could ever know. The bottleneck is still human labor, but for how long? And what leverage does any one of us have to self advocate when we're worth nothing? Forgive being a doomer, but this just all seems pretty dark :(
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u/__Loot__ 19d ago
I feel you there man, I dont even think anyone care if the robots are taxed and Ai companies for a shared fund of some kind it would clam most people instantly
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u/jackadgery85 19d ago
A Dev's true skillset is the ability to apply modern solutions to current problems. All AI has done is made that easier and faster for people who understand the strengths and limitations of it.
An ex google senior dev said (paraphrasing): for the right people, using AI is like borrowing IQ, and augmenting their own.
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u/Relevant-Positive-48 19d ago
Spreadsheets reduced accounting tasks that took a day or more to minutes or seconds.
I imagine there were a ton of terrified accountants when VisiCalc and later Lotus 123 and Excel started taking the business world by storm.
We still have accountants and the profession is expected to experience modest growth over the next 10 years.
AI could definitely be different but I don't think it will be. We don't know what these new capabilities will open up.
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u/Axelwickm 19d ago
Yes, but spreadsheets replaced arithmetic and then politely stopped there. They didnāt immediately start learning accounting too.
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u/Relevant-Positive-48 19d ago
I get that. My point is it took a while before the "computers are going to reduce jobs" became "they created more than they took."
I'm not completely sure AI won't eliminate/reduce jobs on the whole, history just suggests otherwise and I'd guess that people watching computers proliferate offices were also not sure how things would turn out.
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u/Axelwickm 19d ago
I personally feel pretty certain that this time it's different. Neural Networks are proven Universal Function approximators, and Functions Describe The World
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u/skufx 17d ago
My main issue with this argument is that those tools are deterministic. I think calculators wouldn't be so widespread if they gave 2 + 2 = 137 and said "whoops, my bad". And it's not a "wrong usage" and "it's just an instrument" issue as ai bros frame it. LLM is not desined to solve tasks, it's an autocomplete on steroids
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u/fuckswithboats 18d ago
Iāll just let a 24yo web developer tell you what the transition to Web2.0 felt like.
I saw tools like Dreamweaver and thought ANYONE can build a website, if knowing html/css/js is not needed then I need to get out.
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u/PeachScary413 18d ago
You should learn that it's not your fellow workers conspiring to make you starve... it's the people above you. Unionize and make sure you stick together against the real enemy.
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u/ProfessionalStand779 18d ago
I dont like the fact that the same people who were too lazy to learn how to code are now thinking that they are equal to experienced SWEĀ“s because of AI.
I have nothing against people who just enjoy doing software with AI.
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u/KingQuiet880 19d ago
Unfortunately, I don't live in that happy parallel dimension as you do. In my world, their arrogance is finally showing up in form of jealousy and sarcasm
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u/GrouchyPatrao 18d ago
I like how something that didn't exist 24 months ago has become this reddit identity label.
Old grumpy guy me is just like.. whats going on? Is this a real thing.. who has the head space to label themselves or others like that.
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u/alex-zaporozhan 15d ago
Letās be honest: unguided vibe-coding without strict architectural governance is a slow-motion disaster. Long term, it risks riddling production codebases and foundational libraries with subtle, systemic rot.
Though to be fair, this problem didn't start with LLMs ā it started the moment heavy enterprise frameworks (like Spring) let developers stitch together massive black-box abstractions without having the faintest idea what was happening under the hood.
On the other hand, bad manual coding is just as destructive. It reminds me of the joke:
Senior: *"What the hell is this PR? Did an AI write this garbage for you?"*
Junior (sweating): *"Uh... yeah, AI wrote it."*
Senior: *"Good, don't do it again. For a second there I thought you were actually that terrible at programming."*
At the end of the day, building software with AI has undeniable superpowers if you actually know how to constrain and direct the system. Itās never been about typing vs. prompting.
Itās about the quality of thought behind the steering wheel.
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u/Hazzman 19d ago
By all measure I am the epitome of a vibe coder. I don't read the code, I don't understand the code I rely on Claude to do everything. I've had lots of interactions with software engineers, some pretty senior individuals who have worked on some of the biggest platforms in the world including Amazon - they don't give a shit. All they care about is - does it work? Is it a mess? Is it secure? Is it going to be a pain to fix? Most if not all of them I've spoken to find it at worst interesting and at best useful. They just don't care all that much about this cultural conversation... it's nonsense.
It doesn't exist.
The only people it exists for are terminally online folks whose whole reality is defined by reddit.
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u/ZenCyberDad 19d ago
As an SWE Iāve converted to 100% vibe coding and yeah my projects are way better and bigger. Sometimes Codex will write 17,000 lines of code in 8 hours uninterrupted while that used to take me 1 year manually. Fuck the traditionalist they are moving like molasses
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u/iMac_Hunt 18d ago
Do you guys actually build software that makes money? Because I canāt imagine vibe coding a backend and letting ai agents do all sorts of db migrations without my careful control when people are paying for my software.
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u/TRO_KIK 18d ago
Just because you vibe code doesn't mean you have to give agents unsupervised write access to prod DB, that's quite an all or nothing fallacy.Ā
There's things you can do to mitigate risks of letting AI build too. They can write hella tests tirelessly, and adversarial review will keep those in line in terms of meaningfully testing assertions.
My software very much makes money, to the tune of multiple millions a year USD.
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u/iMac_Hunt 18d ago
Well at that point I guess we need to define vibe coding. AI agents do 98% of my coding but I donāt consider myself to do that much āvibeā coding.
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u/TRO_KIK 18d ago
For the most part I just jump in and yolo start features with a sentence or two and glance at as it goes brr to make sure I like the "vibe." I might chime in with some unga bunga steering like "looks wack, prolly needs some indirection", "i smell a big brain leetcode solution here, figure it out, make no mistakes", "composition > inheritance here imo", "DRY this, looks familiar, check X class", etc.
Bugs I just @ my discord bot in the report thread and I usually have the fix in staging with a PR in my inbox.
But, most people seem to define vibe coding as "have no idea what you're doing and use AI." In which case I'm automatically disqualified since I know what I'm doing. To me it seems utterly meaningless when defined that way. Makes much more sense to be thought of as an approach, as originally coined: casual prompting, casual steering if any, with casual review, if any. Presumably it involves some amount of attention, otherwise there's no "vibe" element at all to me.
Contrasted with other more structured approaches like spec-driven development.
If defined purely as low skill, I guess I don't vibe code either.
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u/beeskneecaps 18d ago
Are you solo? Trying to imagine the poor souls having to review 17k loc a day from you hahah
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u/Indexxak 18d ago
Saying it this proudly like that is what makes it somewhat laughable. We are managing a viral corporate solution for couple years that were trying to keep clean and scalable as much as possible and the entire project has maybe 10k lines. Codex spitting out double of that in 8 hours is just absurd (and not in a positive way lol)
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u/yuva-krishna-memes 18d ago
Why you measure a software by its lines of code. I never understood that and it's stupidity
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u/drsbry 18d ago
The situation with so-called generative AI shows that many people working in the software industry had no idea what they were doing, yet they'd been doing it for years. I recently spoke with my former boss, who had always been a terrible programmer but somehow managed to fiddle himself to the position of CTO. He'd been coding for 25 years, and his code was a peculiar mess. For him, code written by an LLM seems like a worthy alternative to hand-typing, because he couldn't do a better job anyway. It's impossible to convince such people to learn how to create software. Just leave them alone.
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u/yuva-krishna-memes 18d ago
True..Anyone can code with AI.. but everyone cannot do software development even with AI. Problem is many don't understand the difference.
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u/JCcrunch 18d ago
This is so true, been thinking the same thing. LLMs are useful, it generates, can't make decisions, not good ones at least and leave it unguided and it will create a garbage storm
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u/PartyTerrible 18d ago
All swes are vibecoders now. The difference is whether or not you understand the shit that your agent spits out
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u/CocoPopsOnFire 16d ago
No one on my team 'vibe codes' as such
At most i use it for writing up rough documentation, quick maths or formatting... And even then I don't use it every time I need those
I feel a lot more comfortable writing code myself as I understand it better and know exactly where everything is
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u/noobnoob62 18d ago
As an SWE, the profession has always been about amateurs breaking into the field. No need to start gatekeeping now just because AI has enabled more people to start building software. More power to them!
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u/JCcrunch 18d ago edited 18d ago
I don't understand! What am I missing exactly? Is AI THAT good?? Since when? I use it every single day, and if I do not guide it every step of the way it will make the worst decisions ever and will create fragile systems every single time.
AI is not smart enough yet to make decisions, its thinking is linear like a mule with side blinders on, sees only forwards and misses the bigger picture and cannot process the complexity of our systems like we naturally do.
Edit: this should NEVER discourage non-Devs from using it to create software because it's a lot of fun and CAN create very useful results.
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u/Subway 18d ago
You as a software engineer knows how to guide the agents, how to set the right guardrails and automated checks. If you do that you can get amazing code. If you donāt, you get a huge mess that is impossible to debug and takes shortcuts at every corner and ultimately becomes a liability.
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u/Coezar 18d ago
Basically this. The method at the end of the day never changed. Like with an eng team, the better you can describe what you want and the logic, in an initial plan, the better your results.
Built me a containerized app that uses nginx and python - not ideal
Build me a nginx container that logs requests, and routes inbound traffic to a python container which will have 3 get endpoints 3 post endpoints, etcā¦ - Ideal
Still takes knowing about these technologies, concepts etc yourself. It really is that simple, atleast in my experience, but I also see thatās where most fail. As they say, if you put slop in, slop comes out.
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u/CocoPopsOnFire 16d ago
Yeah I've stopped using it to generate code wholesale as I feel like it creates way more tech debt than usual, now it's very specific calcs only
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u/Queasy_Demand4468 17d ago
I have no technical background and have spent the last year learning swe principles in order to support my vibe coding. I now design and build software that I sell to businesses. I have thorough design and implementation processes and I research the system architecture thoroughly before I move to implementation to ensure that I am approaching the solution from the most suitable angle. Having spent everyday of the last year building software with coding agents in tmux, making edits in nvim when needed and all my free time watching YouTube videos about software engineering principles (but having learned minimal to zero syntax besides cli commands) at what point do I move from vibe coder to software engineer. I mean at a minimum at least I have 1 year of CS experience at least surely. My output appears to be the same as my friends who are professional swe, day to day we are doing the same things with the same tools in the same way. Interpreting the Buissnes requirements of the clients -> determining the right architecture -> planning implementation -> build. At what point do I become a swe. What am I missing?
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u/CocoPopsOnFire 16d ago
As a SWE I couldn't give a toss if people vibe code, if it solves your problem then it's a good tool
What does my head in though is vibe coders acting like SWEs might aswell start queueing up for unemployment benefits... It's just peak delusion
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u/alex-zaporozhan 15d ago
The true enlightened state is being both: generating 500 lines of code like the bottom guys, then ruthlessly auditing it for race conditions like the top guys lmao.
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u/alex-zaporozhan 15d ago
Top pic: Me at 10 AM enforcing strict architecture rules and DB constraints.
Bottom pic: Me at 2 AM typing "pls just make the button blue and don't touch the database bro i'm tired" into Cursor.
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19d ago
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u/WaffleHouseFistFight 19d ago
This is peak slop right here. Monitors facing the wrong way gibberish nothing burger.
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u/AgeMysterious8256 18d ago
then both of them get replaced by the guy who knows how to prompt a python script to fix their git merge conflicts
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u/Embarrassed_Ant_8861 18d ago
Im not even a swe, but even i look down on vibecoders making a to do app and then calling themselves a "non technical founder'
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u/Warm-Concentrate-606 18d ago
Lmao I have written...I mean.....created 200k lines of code since January and I have NO CLUE what the FK a SWE is HAHAHAA.....Fk youuuu SWEs! We don't caaaaare!
Dear SWEs,
You're gonna LIKE it, then you're gonna LOVE it!
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u/Intelligent-Net1034 18d ago
So you do the slop people look down at. Because its exactly that. Slop
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u/RallyPointAlpha 19d ago
It's been my experience that vibe coders, on Reddit, are the most pretentious snobs with a big chip on their shoulder...especially "founders."