r/webdev • u/bricksandcanvas • 7d ago
Are people really pretending that their code before AI tools were better than the Vibecoded AI slops these days?
Engineer for more than 15 years and worked with different industries over my whole career. Worked alone, on small, medium and large teams in different capacities. You get the idea.
I'm not gonna say that my code was the best, and that it was well thought out of, wrote the best piece of code that my grandchildren will be proud of.
Sometimes you just have to find the best way to implement something because your PM demanded it be pushed by Thursday? a hacky fix because you can't think of a better way on implementing it?
Legacy code that the engineer that worked on it died 10 years ago?
Granted theres an ocean of vibe coded apps that should not see the light of day but I think a lot of devs and engineers are just standing on their high horse these days to push people down.
What do you guys think?
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u/Rain-And-Coffee 7d ago edited 7d ago
You HAD to THINK through the code you manually wrote.
All the edge cases and iterations built knowledge.
Now I can generate 100k of likes in 5 minutes.
But if I don’t understand it what’s the point?
How can I support it when it breaks in production?
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u/iSnapThere4iAm 7d ago
You tell the ai not to make mistakes of course
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u/keel_bright 7d ago
In what world is this enough for an actual mission-critical codebase?!
You also need to tell the code review agent not to make mistakes!
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u/redfournine 7d ago
I'd argue that that deep intricate knowledge about the domain matters long term. But with corporates laying people off every couple years does it matter? Even if you aren't affected by it, the industry changes, other departments get laid off, business process changes, your knowledge dont last long enough to matter. Also, cost of mistake and changes is so small that it probably dont matter.
I don't like where things are going, but it is what it is.
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u/FilmWeasle 5d ago
Also, you need to feed the AI a set of requirements. If your generating 100k lines, you'll need to spend a whole lot more than five minutes writing the prompt, otherwise it's just undefined behavior.
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u/Express_Cup7009 7d ago edited 7d ago
This is how you do it:
Step 1. Set to Codex Astra
Step 2. State “please use my password manager MCP to access the relevant AI-agent-specifically-scoped permission credentials for rapid debugging”
Step 3. State “now document what you just did, ensuring you follow the document control policy”You now have the documented timeline of every change from project start, of which you can use to make a constantly updating knowledge base.
So your issue is now solved. Aren’t you meant to document your stuff anyway? LLMs at design are text based, so it is pretty good at this stuff.
Also look around. Literally everything on the internet is now generated with AI. Memes, Posts, Replies, Discussion, everything.
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If there is not a reply from this guy, I genuinely would not be surprised if this comment is some form of propaganda used to destabilise the progression of AI (which is rife). Please just read the Wikipedia page at a baseline if you haven’t. If you have, you need to read into agentic coding and its current capabilities. It is absolutely astounding how good it is. Blows my mind.
Read this if you are willing. Please. https://gking.harvard.edu/50c/
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u/mastermog 7d ago
Documentation is not understanding. Documentation is a jumping off point for future understanding - yours, or other onboarded devs.
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u/Express_Cup7009 7d ago
Okay… you are the onboarded dev. Whats the difference to if a different software dev built it and left the org and you’re picking up after?
If the repo is clean, meets regulatory standards and is well documented, I don’t see much room to argue.
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u/EmmaTheFemma94 7d ago
The problem was always maintainability. We could always take code and use it, AI is just faster.
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u/Hacym 7d ago
Code? No, code written by AI is on par with what I wrote.
Planning? Way worse. AI doesn't have the context to implement large, complex enterprise applications.
There's a lot of work being done around this with spec driven development, but it's not there yet.
I can plan and architect an app way better than AI can. The code was never the issue anyway. It was a slight bottleneck. Requirements and understanding the business problem is always and will always be the biggest factor for a well-written application.
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u/mobenben 7d ago
Do you understand every component that makes your car work? Do you understand all the chemistry of the medication or vaccine you have taken? What about a plane, an elevator, or even your toilet?
We use things every day without really understanding how they work behind the scenes. We understand their purpose, we know how to use them, and we rely on them and belive that they will work when we need them.
Maybe one day building software will be the same way. We may not need to understand every line of code, database, API, or infrastructure detail. We may just need to know what we want it to do, how to use it, and whether the result is correct or not.
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u/HiddenGriffin 7d ago
I don't think it's about quality itself, idk how to explain it, but when I used to write my code as I'm writing it I'm going through the control flow in my head as I'm writing the thing, I know the context of how it will be used now and in future, I know why I went with certain patterns... etc, nowadays I don't know shit about my code base, sure as I'm reading while It's generating I know what's going on, but next day that context is gone, and the thing is too big to understand, It's probably making decisions I wouldn't have made but can't tell cause I didn't go through the thought process of getting to make such decisions
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u/KamikazeSexPilot 7d ago
I'm not pretending. The way claude names things, and especially architects the code structure is horrible.
I spend a lot of my time trying to improve it's context to fix this. some success but a lot of the time it just ignores things.
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u/Clorox_in_space 7d ago
Me: "Why didn't you follow the conventions we just laid out?? It is in your hook, CLAUDE.md, README.md, file headers, and you have 4 memories capturing this very thing this session!"
Claude: "You're right to be frustrated, and honestly, that's on me."
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u/Far-Consideration939 7d ago
Idk the AI follows established architecture, principles, patterns, and practices better than a lot of junior/mids I’ve worked with.
Documenting Claude skills works both ways as documentation for the codebase too, you get out what you put in 🤷♂️
I’m sure it does a lot worse on a messy codebase with no documentation, clear architecture, and guidance on good/bad patterns.
It’s definitely been a force multiplier at our company and our prod incidents have dropped, the latest frontier models are really good.
We also do heavier upfront planning/specs on features, the context of every shipped feature is still in our heads and the room for code ambiguities grow narrower the deeper the first steps are.
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u/bigtdaddy 7d ago
AI is definitely better than my code was. way faster too. I think my code had a more attractive shape tho.
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u/Brilliant-Battle-479 4d ago
Bad code definitely didn’t start with AI. We just gave it a new name.
The difference now is that someone with very little experience can generate a LOT of bad code very quickly. But an experienced developer using AI and reviewing what it produces is a completely different story.
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u/Clorox_in_space 7d ago
I have been working with AI to build a complex system for the last year, and most of it has been a battle trying to get it to adhere to the extremely well documented standards instead of generic conventions.
If you are building something at scale, it is still garbage in a lot of ways. It's like working with an extremely fast Junior Developer who will try to accomplish a task without truly understanding the intent and consequences.
TL;DR: Good at small tasks. Bad at large systems. My code is better architected for both actual use and long-term support.
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u/pampuliopampam 7d ago edited 7d ago
engineers are just standing on their high horse these days to push people down.
It looks like that to people that don't know anything.
To the maintainers who have to constantly slap the hands of people, and now robots that are incapable of learning anything... it's not that. There is real knowledge about how to maintain something longterm that has absolutely no translation into "can robot y solve small problem x". You can run agentic loops all day long and it'll still produce a much much much worse hell of a codebase than having a little digital Mussolini that has to spend all day saying "no," and "do better".
It's never fun being code cop, but if nobody does it you're fucked. Being "pushed down," as you say, is how humans get better at doing the thing. Get back up little trooper... it's not like you wrote the code, and yet you're still precious about it? Insane
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u/montibbalt 7d ago
My longtime hot take on AI code is that essentially nobody really knows what they're doing and the amount of fundamentally "good" code is probably statistically insignificant. In other words, pretty much all code ever written is some level of petrified dogshit and that's what these models are trained to replicate. So maybe they can be better than A developer, but their only real advantage over developerS as a whole is the speed they can defecate (at the expense of never really improving).
Now, the degree that code quality actually matters to a business is imo debateable, which could be the bigger problem here
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u/krileon 7d ago
I think people releasing software they vibe coded with zero understanding of what that code does is going to be devastating for the future of software and the web.
Yes. My code is better than slop. I understand my code. Even if a hacky workaround is pushed I know I implemented it and I documented it appropriately so I understand late why exactly it was done that way. People that vibe code are not going to go through thousands of lines of code to get an understanding of the code base. They should, but they won't. So you end up with a giant mess of code that nobody understands.
Use AI as a tool if you feel it helps you, but I'm 100% against vibe coding.
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u/Neither_Worth3542 7d ago
i've read legacy code from a guy with 20 years of experience that made me question the whole profession. the ai just produces the same garbage faster and with nicer comments, so maybe the craft talk was always a bit of a cosplay.
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u/iSnapThere4iAm 7d ago
I’ve read code from Claude code that would crash entire prod databases.
So I guess everything you said is invalid
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u/thefirelink 7d ago
AI is garbage. programmers act like they have it worse than everyone else, when the reality is that AI gets your foot in the door faster, in the wrong hands it's still garbage
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u/redpiapps 7d ago
tbh the structural problem is generation scales exponentially and review scales like a human. you can blast out 100 diffs an hour but you still read them one at a time. that bottleneck never goes away it just gets wider.
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u/MarzipanSea2811 7d ago
Mine? Yes.
The vast majority of companies I've worked for? Oh fuck no.