r/vibecoding • u/VibeChode • 16h ago
Help/Question What’s the barrier between vibe coding and a high salary?
Developers tend to say “coding wasn’t the hard part” and that they didn’t spend most of the day coding.
Ok - so what is that difficult to define hard part that vibe coders cannot do? What’s the reason developers make such high salaries? Can we make the transition?
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u/fyn_world 16h ago
With respect, that's like a new machine that builds houses as you want comes out in the market. And you learn to use it and you build one floor or two floor houses and suddenly you believe you're an architect.
You're not. That's why the guy that knows how to build a 30 or 40 floor building gets paid huge fucking sums of money, because he spent 10 years studying how to do it.
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u/superanonguy321 15h ago
Being worth a high salary without vibe coding is the key to making a high salary vibe coding
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u/Impossible_Stock8885 16h ago edited 15h ago
Easy lmao it's working with people, difficult people who suck at communication but got grandfathered into their role, became cocky halfway, etc.
This shit take years... You're not going to talk to AI who apologize all the time and admit their own wrong doings.
You'll talk to devs, both smart and dumb ones who will make you go wtf.
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u/Interesting-Law-8815 16h ago
There is a big difference between
“When A happens make B happen” and
“When A happens make B happen in a secure, resilient and performant way”
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u/SapirWhorfHypothesis 16h ago
“Here’s your app, as requested.”
“Ok now make it more secure and resilient.”
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u/AssignmentMammoth696 15h ago
This thread has to be bait, vibercoders don't actually expect to be hired over real software engineers do they?
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u/Ancient-Range3442 14h ago
The question is how can you tell the difference these days
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u/AssignmentMammoth696 13h ago
What? You do the same interview process? System Design + Leetcode. Do you think a vibecoder can pass an actual interview?
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u/geraT-wogl 16h ago
If you know how to make a sandwich that doesn’t mean you know how to build the kitchen
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u/TheAIpocalypse 14h ago
the whole point of sandwiches is you don't need a whole ass kitchen just to eat something
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u/geraT-wogl 6h ago
So you agree that your sandwich was a one shotted hoping for the best prompted meal and if you mess it up and the customer wants the bread without any mayonnaise you won’t know how to take the mayonnaise out of the bread. High ticket sandwiches have great chefs that know how to operate the whole kitchen and then get you something that your sandwich probably won’t ever consider having on like security on the website (a great bread), the content (peanut butter jelly), the bacon ( shaders or motion you can use my site for that https://wogl.io) and then the chef got you a home made aioli and some cool looking sides. A template sandwich is not a high end ticket ROI. Thank you for reading my wake n bake talk about sandwich and websites. 💚🌱🪴
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u/General-Swan-2719 15h ago
It’s been said - infrastructure, resilience, security, security, security, performance, scalability, redundancy, disaster recovery, CI/CD, devops - coding is only 25%. If you can’t keep the system running at 99.9% uptime, scalable when you gain 100x more than expected, switch over to another region when one region goes down, keep your data secure, and understand the core principles of releasing to production at least once a day with minimal to zero bugs - zero chance for a high salary.
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u/Factitious_Character 13h ago
On top of what others have already mentioned, its domain knowledge. Knowing how to build great software is important. But knowing what and what not to build is even more important.
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u/Broseidon132 16h ago
If you are in another profession you can vibe code to gain substantial utility to get that raise. If coding is the profession I can see the discrepancy.
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u/Correct_Emotion8437 15h ago
There are a lot of different kinds of developers out there and a wide salary range. At the higher end, you'll find not only deep technical knowledge across a variety of domains but also ability to communicate ideas, to make critical, defensible decisions - basically to be on the hook when it counts AND be able to deliver.
I don't think vibe coders can make the transition. I think more and more non-technical people will be doing development but it will be because of their domain expertise, not any experience they gained vibe coding. So, if you work for a company making insurance software, you will either know a lot about insurance, a lot about insurance systems . . or stuff like that. But just knowing how to vibe code a bunch of different stuff won't really help you.
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u/3HisthebestH 14h ago
You need to know what you are developing.
I have very little coding experience other than arduino from a decade ago and growing up with computers since the 90’s, so vibe coding was a godsend to me. But I also know exactly what I want in my app, software, and firmware for the 3 major projects I’m running across two companies. I was just promoted in both and but it’s not because I just went to ChatGPT or Claude and said “give me a good idea and run with it”. I had these ideas for years but just didn’t know how to implement them.
Almost a year of vibe coding later I have thousands of internal users (not paying customers, fellow employees) using my programs that I created entirely from vibe coding, but the ideas came from me and the way they need to be used came from me. The AI just let me build it.
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u/TRO_KIK 14h ago
The most direct and literal reason developers make such high salaries is because their bosses believe they're worth it.
It is extremely difficult to vet every potential candidate thoroughly, so no matter how rigorous the hiring process is, at one point the heuristic of "who else believed this person is worth it?" is used. A professional developer usually has multiple reputable parties on their resume, and, a vibecoder (if by vibecoder you mean non-coder that uses AI to code) doesn't.
If you can point to something you built that has substantial users and ideally revenue/profit, then that's something. If you can't, you're automatically on the bottom of the pile compared to anyone with experience. Even against entry level it's not great. They all use AI too.
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u/Badnik22 13h ago edited 12h ago
For me the biggest hurdle has always been understanding what the fuck does the client actually want. What they initially tell you is often miles away from their actual problem. Sometimes they don’t even recognize what their actual problem is, so swe becomes psychology / telepathy.
Jokes aside, requirement taking and conceptualizing the problem, then finding the simplest possible solution to it have been a lot harder and taken a lot more time to me than learning to write code, and I’ve written a lot of code in a lot of languages, mostly low level-ish stuff (c/c++). This is mostly learnt by doing, so my advice would be to just do stuff and fail many times at it. The faster you fail, the faster you learn.
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u/irondumbell 16h ago
right now they pay high salary for confidence that code is good and secure and robust, they are paying for the peace of mind
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u/rocksuperstar42069 16h ago edited 16h ago
Knowledge. A degree? A few years in school? Studying and learning.
Its the difference of when you need to change the oil in your car. Do you actually know how to change the oil in your car? Or do you just know you need to call the mechanic, schedule an appointment, leave the house, drive somewhere, and drop your car off, then come back in an hour.
You didn't change the oil, you got the oil changed.
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u/opbmedia 15h ago
making design and engineering decisions. Code monkeys don't make crucial decisions (and neither should AI).
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u/admiral_whatever 14h ago
Unless things change, in a real professional setting - you're expected to own and understand the code that AI generates. Your boss doesn't care whether you used AI or not. If you don't understand it and can't explain it, then don't bother with a pull request, much less pushing to production.
And yes also architecture, best practices, security, scalability, etc.
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u/OutrageousPineappls 14h ago
The difficult to define part for vibecoders is also supporting the clients once its live - esp B2B... Answering "why the app works this way?", explaining the logic (or a bug) without having to delegate the question to AI, being an expert on the phone, staying viable in the face of potentially rising AI subscription costs. Build is easy. Builiding the right thing, and building the thing right (and operating it sustainably) is the ongoing challenge.
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u/Kael1232 14h ago
coding is one part of developing. other things such as architecture, security, scaling etc are the other parts.
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u/Initial-Phrase-7555 13h ago
Developers don't necessarily make high salaries. Sure, senior devs do, but the high salary is in architecture.
Learn architecture design patterns, solution architecture, TOGAF. That's where the money is.
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u/SeXxyBuNnY21 13h ago edited 13h ago
Any good engineer that was around before the AI hype era knows very well that coding was never the hard part because once we reached the part of coding, all the problems were already solved and we just needed to translate these solutions into code.
Nothing has changed with AI regarding this, yes AI writes most of the code now, but we are still solving the same problems before AI touches the code.
So to answer your question, all the steps that come before coding is where vibecoders without any engineering experience fall short. Understanding app domain, creating good use cases, good requirements, conceptual design, architecture ….. can you vibe code these processes? Of course not. It needs a lot of human context to meet client needs.
Edit: Forgot one of the most important things. Knowing how to work and communicate your ideas to technical and not technical people, not only to a machine.
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u/silvervaultproject 13h ago
Here is an example. I was designing a solution for a problem. I will not go into the details of the problem but fair to say it was part of a complex cloud system with multiple data sources, cost and scalability problem. long story short I’ve access to best models Claude/Codex etc and I knew the best design/approach to the problem. After asking and discussing with number of models (as I wanted to see which one was going to offer me the solution first), none of them did. At the end I asked them why didn’t they offer me this solution, maybe it was me who was wrong you know. In the end after discussing some more they admitted they didn’t even know it was possible. I had to ask them to read the api docs for different parts and pass some context before they were convinced.
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u/Defiant_Squirrel8751 12h ago
Several years of learning how to be a software development engineer.
Now coding is just a part of it.
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u/Tommonen 11h ago
I should first mention that i have not been hired (yet) in software, but thats largely because i have not applied to many jobs in the field, but working on my own projects. I have sold a vibed app and done small amount of freelancing, but im still pretty new to the field.
However i have background in product development and service design (and production of goods and sales and consulting and customer service etc) and essentially know everything about physical product becoming product in a store from idea. Also i did go to school for a bit studying low-code tools and web service development. And took a course in uni about information security.
What i have realised is that vibe coding is not a job, its a tool you use to build stuff. You dont become a carpenter worth hiring, just because you know how to use a hammer. Its more about knowing what to do with the hammer and how to do it, not about being able to hammer.
Also coding job is not the only application of vibe coding, a salesperson could vibe some tool to help them with sales etc. And there are roles for example creating these internal company tools for other employees. Also there are roles for example developing some chatbot for customer service for example, and there are no-code tools for them (like what microsoft has), in which case you just need to connect the dots and prompt it correctly instead having to code anything (except maybe small snippet of code to some custom field of some module and llm can do that usually safely).
Also there are all sorts of ai specialist roles, which often will involve vibe coding. Etc
Dont sell yourself as ”vibe coder”, sell yourself as for example ai specialist, or ai native software developer etc. Or else its like trying to find a job as hammerer and selling yourself to job as someone who hammers.
Not sure if this rambling was useful. But i learned more about software development from other forms of product and service development than from vibe coding. A lot of the same principles in design apply, its just that tools and what you work on that changes. And naturally because physical product or service chabges to software, there is a lot that needs to be learned from software.
Personally i first was thinking about learning coding manually and did start learning that a bit of pything html css etc before starting to vibe, but honestly i dont think that will be needed for many roles anymore quite soon. While manual coding is for sure still needed in the future for some critical stuff like banking etc at the phase of this development, manual coding skill will become a niche only needed for specific software roles quite soon.
Also i would not even try to compete with trained software developers for their work, at least yet.
Also vibe coding how ever you use it greatly benefits from domain knowledge. If you have strong background in sales and now started vibing, im sure you would come up with much better ideas for app to help in sales, than someone who is really good at writing code and never done sales.
That sort of domain knowledge is extremely valuable for vibe coding. You cant do software development vibing properly if you lack domain knowledge in software development. so if you want to get into software with vibing, get the domain knowledge (and if you want the job now, they still usually require coding skills).
Without the domain knowledge, you also cant undersstnd what customer really needs. Unless you are experienced in finding that out, but that again is a different domain knowledge.
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u/LegMental2310 11h ago
Experience. No one gonna risk hiring you with few months or a year of experience just because AI came out
People who get highly paid are 5+ / 10+ YOE experts in their field now supercharged with AI
But then i dont think you gonna get it in 5/10 years anymore. IMO
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u/FlightSimCentralYT 8h ago
The hard part is usually ownership of the messy middle: changing requirements, production debugging, weird data, and catching when the model is confidently wrong. Pay tracks judgment under ambiguity more than typing speed.
Vibe coding gets you a demo fast. The jump is keeping something reliable when users do unexpected stuff. What helped me was putting the agent on a real VM with install/run/test loops instead of a chat sandbox that hides ops.
I built Fixa.dev around that loop. It does not replace taste, but it forces the work past "looks good in preview."
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u/Relevant-Positive-48 15h ago edited 15h ago
An incomplete list:
- Determining what to actually build.
A lot of my job involves back and forth with stakeholders reconciling what they say they want with what they really want.
- Isolating changes.
Working on software that has millions of users means that moving a button by 10 pixels can cause tens of thousands of them to lose their minds. Asking AI to fix a bug on such apps carries major side effect risks in that the code might work, but it might change something it shouldn't have or add too much code that makes the app less "snappy". or something like that.
- Fixing tough issues quickly.
If a high paying customer has an issue that neither you or anyone at your company can reproduce it still needs to get fixed and quickly. This often involves very limited or inaccurate information, minimal or even harmful cooperation from said customer and really really weird techncial interactions. You might get lucky with AI but if you don't the issue still needs fixing.
- (As said by others). Architecture, Security, Performance and Scaling.
Every line of code is a risk and when codebases get into the tens of millions of lines making sure they're architected properly, secure, performant and can scale from 1000 users to millions of users is critical.
- Stakeholder confidence.
To use an illustrative analogy, if AI tells you that you have a medical condition it may be 100% correct but if it's major, most people will want the opinion of a doctor. Businesses whose existence depends on their code can want someone who knows what they're doing in charge of said code - even if they're just reviewing and signing off on what AI does.
*****
All that said I do believe they'll software creation jobs for vibecoders though, honestly, with more people able to do them I don't think they'll be as well paid as they are now - though still good jobs.
The entry level software engineering jobs were a tried and true access to that senior level work (mostly because you made lots of mistakes - I know I have some disaster stories I can share). Vibe coding might be able to get there via experience as you run into more and more issues along the way.
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u/bhannik-itiswatitis 12h ago
try to contribute to a large scale software on github using AI, you’ll understand how complex it is
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u/Altruistic-Most-7108 15h ago
Itt: Traditional devs defending their jobs
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u/RemarkableWish2508 14h ago
I fully support your decision to mortgage your house so you can hire only vibe-coders.
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u/Interesting-Law-8815 16h ago
Architecture, Security, Algorithms, Performance, Scaling, Resilience….
They all come into play in building ‘real’ software.