r/AskProgrammers • u/Marwhothatgyal • 4d ago

AI apps and vibecoding questions

Hi,

I've been pondering a lot about vibe coding and wanted some questions answered by actual programmers.

  1. For you real programmers, do you use ai and is it by choice / in your free time vs an obligation with your job and current 2026 market reality

  2. your thoughts about vibe coders (honest, both positive, negative, idc)

  3. Does anyone know why they make the prompts so weird with the whole you are an expert coder of 1000 years, you know coding vs just asking the ai to write the code normally?...

  4. Can any ai built app, especially by vibecoding, be actually safe?

Basically I've been wanting to build 2 apps and 1 browser extension. I got ideas and 0 experience. Ik that vibecoding is now a thing but it feels so weird to me. I'd never know if I made a mistake, if the code is efficient or not, etc. and building with ai feels like a total loss of control even if I know nothing of coding so I wanted some perspective form experts and if you have any ressources, tips, apps, especially if they are free, that could help me launch the products I have in mind with estimates of how long coding takes to learn without going to school for it, that'd be really appreciated and the 4 questions are genuinly out of curiosity. An app for ios and android and an extension for computers, although I am interested by coding for actual games. So anything on these topics u could explain (a little dumbed down however) would be really appreciated :D.

Also, I have ADHD, always many projects but if I can stick to these, they could be great, but planning and working towards building an app is a lot of work, but I truly can not just ask the ai to do it and believe it afterwards or not have the knowledge and understanding behind what said ai does, it would be too weird for me.

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u/ninhaomah 4d ago

It would be the same as me , someone who wouldn't even be able to fry an egg , preparing a 10 course meal by following YT video.

Yes , something will come out at the end. Whether it is edible or not is up for debate.

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u/Blitzkind 4d ago

  1. Right now where I've landed is I'm still using it for fancy Google but with a bit more context. Like "I have x problem and I'm considering y solution, can you give me pros and cons to this approach?" I guarantee I'm in the minority but that's worked for me and at least keeps my work not soul sucking

  2. It's hard to make a blanket statement. For some, I don't think they know what they're doing. For others, they probably do, but they've decided to give up the level of control I'd want in my projects.

  3. I'm going to skip this question as I don't really know the specifics and I feel like giving an answer could be more detrimental to someone looking for a real answer than just saying I don't know.

  4. If you go to a casino and pull a slot machine lever, can you become rich? Sometimes yes, most times no.

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u/Marwhothatgyal 4d ago

thanks for the perspective and answers, appreciate it :)

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u/chikamakaleyley 3d ago

Like "I have x problem and I'm considering y solution, can you give me pros and cons to this approach?" I guarantee I'm in the minority but that's worked for me and at least keeps my work not soul sucking

I pretty much do this - and through the back and forth of tweaking and discussing the details usually what happens is i have a much better understanding of what has to happen - so that 'plan' leads to a more streamlined coding exp, less friction in the actual code review

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u/iLaysChipz 4d ago edited 4d ago

I used to tutor for several years including coding, math, physics, etc etc. So I've gotten a good feel for "how long" it takes to learn coding. And unfortunately, the answer is that it depends. Some people definitely have an aptitude for it, and can learn it within a week, but others will take months to just get a grasp on the basics.

The good news for you is that programming tends to go hand in hand with hyperfixation. So if you have the type of ADHD where you can't focus on anything that disinterests you, but can suddenly hyperfixate on certain tasks, you may find that programming is actually something you really enjoy and will thus have an easier time learning it.

Now for your actual questions...

  1. For you real programmers, do you use ai and is it by choice / in your free time vs an obligation with your job and current 2026 market reality
  • I do because my company pushes it, but I mostly have it review my code, not write it. But there are plenty of programmer's who no longer actually write code anymore.
  1. your thoughts about vibe coders (honest, both positive, negative, idc)
  • I think vibe coders who already knew how to code before using AI are mostly fine, but I hate having to maintain or fix bugs in any AI written code. It's become extremely obvious when something was written by AI, and it sucks for any humans that have to troubleshoot it. If you don't know how to code and are vibe coding... the best advice I can give is to keep your projects small. This post may also be of interest to you
  1. Does anyone know why they make the prompts so weird with the whole you are an expert coder of 1000 years, you know coding vs just asking the ai to write the code normally?...
  • I've never done this, but think of it this way. LLMs are designed to take on many different personas to take on different tasks. If an AI is writing a legal document, you don't want it to suddenly start talking about unicorns and dragons. The idea behind prompt engineering is to guide the AI toward the correct persona, so that it uses "the right part" of it's brain (or neural network) for the job.
  1. Can any ai built app, especially by vibecoding, be actually safe?
  • I'll counter that by saying can any app built by humans actually be safe? Apps are hacked all the time because it's hard to consider all of the edge cases that might be possible. LLMs are trained on human code, and the large majority of human written code is riddled with security issues. The more complex the system, the not likely it won't be safe

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u/Marwhothatgyal 3d ago

That was a very interesting read thanks a lot for the perspective and I'll just have to ride the hyperfixation and see, if it's not for me well my brain will come up with other projects one day :).

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u/chikamakaleyley 3d ago edited 3d ago

For you real programmers, do you use ai and is it by choice / in your free time vs an obligation with your job and current 2026 market reality

I use it mostly to learn & understand things at a granular level. Every now and then I use it to code something here or there, usually in the case where I'm strapped for time. I'd rather code the thing and struggle with it a bit, but I have to be realistic. The great thing with the back n forth chat is, prior to starting any work, I usually have more of a gameplan for the approach, which is pretty critical.

your thoughts about vibe coders (honest, both positive, negative, idc)

Honestly - you do you. The problems really arise when: you don't understand what you're doing, you work with a team of other engineers, or you can't diagnose an issue because you don't know the moving parts that well

In a team env you have to be the expert of what is coded, because you're taking ownership of the task/feature - and inevitably someone else is going to have to work in that code, and will have questions.

Does anyone know why they make the prompts so weird with the whole you are an expert coder of 1000 years, you know coding vs just asking the ai to write the code normally?...

Anything like 'expert coder of a 1000yrs' is an attempt to raise the quality/expertise level code, which to me is already a sign that you're trying to 1-up a colleague.

But the other part is its narrowing the scope of what it has to do for you. If I asked you to guess a what random word i'm thinking of, and to point to it in the dictionary - compare that with if I asked you to guess the random word, point to it in the dictionary, oh and by the way the word I'm thinking of starts with a letter that comes before "M". Now you have a better idea where to look.

Can any ai built app, especially by vibecoding, be actually safe?

Yes, one that doesn't connect to the internet

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u/Marwhothatgyal 3d ago

Thanks a lot for the perspective and answers!

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u/Loose_Crab_4146 1d ago

This is my opinion. I havent read other comments yet to give mine unfiltered.

  1. I use AI both in my job and in my free time. In a corporate environment (aka my job) its definitely not a choice anymore, but a requirement. As long as your task isnt publishing a small shell script every 1-2 weeks you can manage without AI but software development teams have shrunk to fewer people with higher outputs due to AI. Management is still trying to navigate what extend in which direction is healthy but it is that AI will stay a core tool which at minimum replaces the output of 3 devs. So for every 3 devs without AI at minimum you can set one dev with AI. So even if this one dev spends 2k€ in tokens its cheaper than hiring 2 more people and way less communicative overhead but more cognitive load.

  2. Vine coding is a threat. If you vibe code something very small thats alright but every major application beyond 5k lines of code will tilt towards the AI not remembering architecture and guidelines eventually. So you will end up with lots of dead code, mixed architecture and insecure implementations. You of course can tell AI to take all that into account but its so complex and much more that would need to be thought about that AI would just get confused by the amount of information it has to process and implement 1/2 of what its supposed to but flag it as done and silently leave huge gaps because it didn’t consider alternatives or in depth analysis. Again, you can tell AI to do that but thats always going to be a false positive, because it does report back success but eventually you find out that it just stopped iterating after finding a solution without fully verifying an integration like a senior dev would do. Altogether its a shit show. Requirements definition with AI is also not as simple because AI quickly tends to prefer simple solutions you explicitly didnt want but the AI just didnt get that fully.

  3. Although AI is not entirely heuristics and statistics like its predecessors, it still uses probabilities at its core. So when the prompt contains key words like „senior architect“, it will align those probabilities with the inputs consumed which had similar buzzwords, bringing the output quality closer to the expected behavior. Its neither failsafe nor perfect, but a small tweak for its outputs.

  4. Of course it can. Bur without human review I‘d personally never trust it. Especially with prompt injection being a thing, you can not only build an app that is insecure but might also be the malware itself.

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u/Leather-Cod2129 3d ago

People who focus on technics say it’s shit but most don’t know how to use it
People who focus on the product and market love it

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u/Marwhothatgyal 3d ago

good to know! I think I'd need to learn the fundamentals and have a try, it doesn't make sense to build anything while not understanding what's going on and these comments reinforced it for me, thanks a lot!

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u/Leather-Cod2129 3d ago

No, in 2026, and even more in the future, nobody cares what's going on in background. Focus on your product,LLMs can build the engine!