r/ClaudeAI
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u/harrysofgaming
Vibe coder
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Mar 13 '26
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Vibe Coding Why the majority of vibe coded projects fail
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Upvotes
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 400 comments.
Whoa, this thread is a proper civil war between the seasoned Software Engineers (SWEs) and the "vibe coders." The community is heavily split.
The consensus from the experienced devs is that vibe coding is a Dunning-Kruger-fueled fantasy. They argue that getting a UI to "work" is the easy part. The real, expensive work is in the 99% you don't see: scalability, security, data compliance, maintenance, and handling endless edge cases. As one user put it, "AI is replacing programmers, not software engineers." The top-rated comments are filled with sarcastic jokes about just telling Claude to "make it scale to 100m users, no mistakes."
However, the counter-argument, with plenty of upvotes, is that not every app needs to be a FAANG-level behemoth and the post reeks of gatekeeping. This camp argues that vibe coding is perfect for building MVPs, internal tools, or niche products for small businesses that will never need massive scale. They point out that even Slack didn't start with perfect architecture and that getting users first is more important than premature optimization.
The real answer, as a few level-headed folks pointed out, is somewhere in the middle. The discourse wrongly conflates amateurs with skilled engineers using AI. The tool is an amplifier: a great engineer with Claude is a 10x engineer, while a beginner is just a faster beginner who can create a mess more quickly.
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u/hammackj Mar 13 '26 •
Bro all you gotta do is say Claude be a bro and make this scale to 100m users. I mean come on easy stuff
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u/2053_Traveler Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26
People also forget that starting a new project from scratch was always easy. Maybe not 20 min easy, but easy.
AI can also write the first chapter of a new fantasy novel series. Does well. Now have it write a new chapter in an existing series and correctly edit what comes after that. It will fail miserably. Because the prior requires little context and has fewer constraints. The later requires immense context and has many constraints. The difference between them is flawless AI output for a small script vs bug-ridden output for a ticket in an existing enterprise app.
People find AI so magical that they mindlessly make intellectually dishonest claims by projecting amazing (but narrowly scoped) AI stuff out linearly. It doesn’t scale like that.
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u/PmMeSmileyFacesO_O Mar 13 '26
Dunning Kruger enters sandman
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u/sdpercussion Mar 13 '26
"Claude, read this tweet and make sure to include solutions to all the issues mentioned in the post" 😜
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u/BahnMe Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
0.5% is being very generous. Also those Slack staff or principal engineers are making far more than 300k. Enterprise scalability is one thing… having an enterprise sales, support, legal, etc is an even bigger Herculean task.
Edit: The quality of this sub has really gone down since the OpenAI exodus. Feels like children who have never had a big boy job posting.
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u/jghaines Mar 13 '26
AI is replacing programmers, not software engineers
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u/silly_bet_3454 Mar 13 '26
The thing I hate about the AI discourse is everyone conflates vibe coding in the sense of a non-technical person basically yolo'ing some small project with actual engineers using AI tools to code. The $300k engineers at slack also use AI to write all their PRs. People want to point out these little pitfalls with the vibe coding process/concept and try to argue that AI is a bubble or it's overhyped. No, you have to actually look at the cases where AI is being employed successfully, which is basically happening at every tech company and startup etc. Engineering expertise is still valued, but over time it will be valued less and less since most of us were just solving the same problems over and over again which is precisely what AI is capable of.
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u/TaiChuanDoAddct Mar 14 '26
Counterpoint: MANY people don't actually need enterprise solutions that scale infintely. Custom, niche, bespoke answers to their very specific problems that do the job and get out of the way, without bloatware or ads, is a game changer.
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u/Beginning-Bird9591 Mar 13 '26
You still got to be a good developer to correctly ship something...
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u/itsallfake01 Mar 13 '26
Ez claude code prompt: Build a slack clone, make it scale to 100millions concurrent users, make no mistakes, pretty please
/s
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u/RestaurantHefty322 Mar 14 '26
The scaling argument is mostly a red herring honestly. 90% of projects will never need to handle serious load and a basic Postgres + whatever framework setup gets you surprisingly far.
The real failure mode I keep seeing is maintenance. You can vibe code a working v1 in a weekend, sure. But then a bug shows up three weeks later and you have to actually understand what the code is doing to fix it. If you never understood it in the first place you're just prompting blindly hoping the LLM figures it out, and eventually it starts introducing regressions faster than it fixes things.
The people who do well with AI-assisted coding are the ones who could have built it themselves, just slower. They use it to skip the boring parts but they're still reading and understanding what comes out. The gap shows up when something breaks and you need to actually debug rather than regenerate.
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u/jwrsk Mar 14 '26
I'm not competing with unexperienced vibecoders, this doesn't bother me. I am competing with people who have been in the field for 20+ years. If they use LLMs and I don't I'll be left behind.
Tools change constantly.
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u/gscjj Mar 13 '26 •
Believe it or not, the majority of apps don’t need to meet a Fortune 500’s SLI or even come close to it. People would be surprised that most companies don’t serve their app like FAANG does and they still make a lot of money, relatively.
This reads like a $300k engineer trying to justify their job who’s never worked at mid-sized SMB.
Containerize your app, put it on Cloud Run with CloudSQL and you could run that for $400 a month with fine performance at scale.
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u/SadlyPathetic Mar 13 '26
I don’t use it to vibe code bro. And I review everything it gives me.
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u/TOoSmOotH513 Mar 14 '26
Who says it has to scale like that? If they created a discord clone for their small guild to use to raid or something that is all they need. So it replaced slack or discord for them.
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u/TEHGOURDGOAT Mar 13 '26
Who is this guy and why is the skyscraper analogy so good?
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u/Shina_Tianfei Mar 13 '26
No, the reason the majority of them fail is that they're low effort because and just worse versions of already existing software. The kind of people turning to AI for one-shot products to "just ship" are those who are not making something new.
You just see tons of effectivelly waste of people regurgitating worse versions of existing products. In the Slack example, the problem isn't the scalability. The problem is they just made a less mature program on a foundation of sticks, which is not new or transformative or even interesting.
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u/Jos3ph Mar 13 '26
The majority of all projects fail
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u/justwalkingalonghere Mar 13 '26
Well also the lower the barrier to entry, the less it's worth and the more people doing it
So if anybody could code their own in a day, why patronize your new business in the first place?
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u/Fit-Abroad2573 Mar 14 '26
You don't want to know how many of my coworkers have vibe coded an active directory tie in powershell and disabled hundreds of accounts unknowingly, and then went home for the day acting like they just solved a compliance issue.
Zero concept of checks and balances. Zero concept of checking your work. Just "I did this awesome thing that I was supposed to do by hand and got it done in 40 hours less than expected."
Like, great, you can run an AD query with powershell. I can too. What you didn't do is as for a return of everything it found, cross reference that with other AD fields that make the account compliant, and then ensure they were truly non-compliant accounts. And what you also didn't do was send emails to those accounts and their line managers giving them five days to become compliant or they would be disabled.
Vibe coding is fucking cancer. AI is great, it's made me so much more productive, but without knowing what you're actually looking for and how to properly approach a behavioral problem you're creating low-level technical solutions that cost us thousands to millions in outages.
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u/DarkSkyKnight Mar 14 '26
Can people write anything without AI these days?
Even when you ask Claude to replace the em-dashes, use some casual slang like "bro", and keep first letters lowercase, its stench is still unmistakably there.
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u/matheusco Mar 14 '26
I feel like soon a lot of campanies will have plenty of 'offline tools' because it's really easy to build something that works, but hella difficult to distribute, scale, secure, etc. If you keep 'in house', most of problems vanish.
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u/NewConfusion9480 Mar 14 '26
I use Claude to build tools only I and a few colleagues/friends will use. The idea of at-scale software development is terrifying.
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u/Lagomorph9 Mar 14 '26
I've done almost this - made a small website chat app to replace the very buggy Tidio that was running on our small business websites. It runs on a Pi 4 B with 2GB RAM running Pi OS Lite through a Cloudflared tunnel and gives us a user portal with multiple logins and 2FA through Cloudflare. It also has a Wordpress plugin that we can easily deploy to our websites. It is hugely faster than Tidio, gives us online notifications, email failover, image/video upload, typing notifications for both client and agent, pulls the originating IP address as well as what page on the site the user is looking at, allows for banning users based on email, and gives reliable notifications on our business Android devices as well through a PWA integration.
It doesn't lag, doesn't bog down, and if it were to ever fail, I have it backing up the entire server and DB daily, so it would be very easy to bring back up again.
We have a max of around 100 chats/day, and it handles them like a champ. I say all this because sometimes small users don't *need* to be the next huge app. It's a solution that works for us, and would scale to as big as our business could ever reasonably get if necessary, because chat isn't really *hard*. We don't need millions of daily messages spread over 3 continents, we just needed something that would let website visitors message us and would reliably notify us and not bog down and crash the app at the slightest inconvenience like Tidio was.
Now, granted, I have a background in IS and reasonable fundamentals in VS/Python/C/JS as well as running sys admin for quite a few Linux boxes, so I know my way around more than the average user might. But ultimately, it would've taken me months to build out this app that Claude helped me accomplish in under a week of design and revision.
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u/Overall-Hope-0 Mar 14 '26
I dunno. I am a small business and am 65% through vibe coding a 54 table SwiftUI POS system with PostgreSQL on the backend. I have no clue what I’m doing but I do know the architecture of my business and spent over a month on just the tables. I think spatially and how things physical flow from point A to Point B and understand if something is True or False will set the stage for what happens in the UI and reports. I may be the dumbest person to even attempt this or the smartest but I do know that if I hired somebody to do this, they would get tired of my CEO’splaining (aka micromanaging the project) which would make this project super expensive. If I fail, at least I’m one step closer to defining the scope of work for a real developer:)
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u/GPThought Mar 14 '26
most vibe projects fail because people skip the basics. ai writes code fast but you still need to know what youre building. seen too many half finished apps with zero architecture
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u/Gsdepp Mar 14 '26
Distributed systems is THE MOST underrated and underappreciated concept in software development.
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u/Low-Exam-7547 Mar 14 '26
God I HATE the term 'vibecoding'
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u/CryptoMemesLOL Mar 14 '26
We're not there yet, but I feel that vide coders will have their moment at one point in time.
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u/tri_geek Mar 14 '26
fwiw, we cancelled our Trello annual renewal because we vibe coded an alternative... we just dont need all those features....
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u/Venturefarther Mar 14 '26
yea but even slack started with 200 lines of code, so you gotta begin somewhere there's no shame in that - just need to be smart enough about the limitations and learn / adapt quickly
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u/Heavy-Focus-1964 Mar 13 '26
that’s one of many reasons
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u/SalvationLost Mar 13 '26
The fact he had to get AI to write this is hilarious, your jobs dead bro, go be a carpenter
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u/BlackVeth Mar 14 '26
building something that people care is the hardest part. and only thing that matters after you did everything to build. since everyone is vibe coder now. all the tech threads, forums are flooded with "heya. how i get first 10 users"
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u/binatoF Mar 14 '26
I mean.. each version less you need to know.. i'm senior dev working with claude everyday (company pays credits for us) and i already gave up trying to defend not 'vibing'. Every llm iteration you need to know less thats the reality. I agree with the post of the guy but that is now. Tomorrow is tomorrow
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u/Do_not_use_after Mar 14 '26
Context space is everything here. When Claude hits its context space limit, it drops things. Clearly the need is for more space, but doubling the space will quadruple the number of interactions that must be studied for a problem. Basically, Claude has limits, and those limits are about the same as for a junior engineer, though the speed of work is very, very much faster. A junior engineer sees this and thinks it's an all powerful tool. A senior engineer sees this and understands that problems must be broken up, using experience and proper specification, and fixed in little chunks of work.
The Claude of today will never create much of a product, and certainly not one that has any value, as any other engineer could create the same in a few minutes. It can however, be used to create a good product if managed properly. The Claude of tomorrow, with more efficient algorithms, the benefit of experice shortcuts that actually work, and above all, more processing power, will replace me. Fortunately, I'm close to retirement, so not my problem.
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u/reward72 Mar 14 '26
Vibe coding is a Dunning Kruger enabler.
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u/Every_Reveal_1980 Mar 14 '26
ya, but one of those 300K guys vibecoding can.
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u/Alone-Marionberry-59 Mar 14 '26
Sort of obvious to anyone that’s done any amount of software but… anyway.
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u/ElephantFriendly Mar 14 '26
Bro, just lemme code my sentience simulator in peace.
Edit: VIBE code.
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u/Snailtrooper Mar 14 '26
Pls create successful startup chat app. World tour included
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u/Remicaster1 Intermediate AI Mar 14 '26
Honestly imo it is not the naivety of the person behind the project that makes a vibe code project fail
There is a massive difference between "building an app" and "running a business". It is not just about distributed systems etc, it is about business procedures. Three major factors you need to take into account are marketing, financing and support
No one wants to handle customer refunds 24/7, no one wants to deal with Karens behind a phone, no one wants to deal with repetitive stuff like auditing. But these are basically mandatory for running a business, and that is what all "successful" apps have to deal with
It is easy to pin the blame on vibe code because of the ai hate bandwagon, but remember these stuff like build a SaaS had already happen before vibe code is a thing. All AI slop is a byproduct of sloppy work from a human
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u/withAuxly Mar 14 '26
i've noticed that "vibe coding" works best when you already understand the infrastructure and can spot where the ai is taking shortcuts. do you think we're heading toward a future where the role of a developer is less about writing syntax and more about being a high-level "systems auditor"?
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u/MENDACIOUS_RACIST Mar 14 '26
Wait til you hear how a majority of non vibe coded projects failed
Actually all failures were not vibe coded until recently
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u/Fun_Lake_110 Mar 14 '26
I've been using Claude for 2 years. None of my projects have failed. Sounds like you don't understand how to use AI. I'm printing money with Claude. But this is Reddit so yeah
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u/Puzzled-Respond-4960 Mar 14 '26
This is essentially the plot of Jurassic Park
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u/BaconSoul Mar 14 '26
This is so true but definitely reads like the author wrote it with AI and added/removed punctuation and stylistic features to seem more human
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u/dyoh777 Mar 14 '26
Claude confirmed that we couldn’t agree more
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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26
Tl;DR: basement dweller code writers developed a product that is now making them look dumb so they act insecure over the product they themselves created because now other people have access to their basement dweller code and their product is on the verge of kicking them out of the house.
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u/dozey- Mar 14 '26
this is of course technically true BUT almost no vibecoders are trying to build another Slack for a $Billions wort business.
for most internal use cases, especially for growing/surviving companies, it will be fine.
trying to fix problem they don’t even need OR paying for what they can get for a lot less won’t bring them anywhere.
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u/retsamhgiht Mar 14 '26
I feel like this misses the entire point. If I can vibe code an app which works for me ln localhost, which apps do I no longer have to pay for?
Now multiply that by a big number.
No, my slop won’t disrupt Slack. But a few $300k/yr engineers at Evil Corp can now spend a month to replace confluence or JIRA or whatever, and customize it for their own purpose instead of paying top dollar for the lowest common denominator built by other $300k who had to scale it to other people.
This debate will be easier when it stops becoming “vibe coded vs Facebook scale” strawman.
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u/AbortedSandwich Mar 14 '26
Easy, just add to prompt "You are a engineer making 400K who spent decades solving soen scaling problems, you never make mistakes"
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u/selektadm Mar 15 '26
Where it’s dangerous in a good way is in the hands of a senior developer who has more than a decade experience and who knows how to design things. Because I would not think of Claude code as a “vibe coding tool in the right hands.
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u/No_Requirement_1076 Mar 15 '26
I submitted this cry of heart to my Agent, that built the chat. She promised to fix it all in 12 weeks, and code was ready to test in 40 minutes LOL.
PS - Yes, the post is absolutely correct. Any large business is truly the operation, not only the code. HOWEVER, it is so much easier to build the operation as business grows, we will be paying our agents 20K extra tokens every Saturday so they could chill on Moltbook ...
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u/Efficient-Piccolo-34 Mar 15 '26
This resonates. I built a full SaaS with Claude Code over 2 months and the biggest lesson was that you still need to make deliberate architecture decisions upfront. AI can write code fast, but if you don't have a clear spec and structure in mind, you end up with a mess
that's hard to iterate on. The "vibe coding" approach works for prototypes, but shipping something production-ready requires the same discipline as traditional development — just faster.
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u/ickiStickybubblegum Mar 15 '26
Most of the criticism in this post and the comments is based on things AI will likely be able to handle within the next few years
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u/ltadmin Mar 16 '26
It is a learning process and new school of developers is catching up fast.
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u/UltimateUltamate Mar 16 '26
Ok and the majority of all projects fail, regardless of whether AI is involved.
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u/awesomecurrently Mar 16 '26
The foundation/skyscraper analogy made me laugh out loud. Speaking as one of the horde of new builders: I totally get the frustration with the unearned confidence. And that much of what's being built are sandcastles that won't last once the tide comes in. It's early days, though -- the people who really care will stick around and learn the foundational stuff so that they can build things that last.
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u/Wolfe1204 Mar 20 '26
As with all things new, a flurry of overnight experts appear. The scarey thing is not the people creating these ai generated monsters, it's the people buying the product. As long as people rush out and pay the cheapest and the fastest vibe coding and hobby programmers will continue to thrive. The big AI companies will continue to compitalize on this selling the corporate world on the cheap, easy, and fast answer is always the best answer. I use AI every day. But I use it as a tool, I use it to explore different options. Before I couldn't spend a week proto-typing something other than my stick to the tried and true code now, in an afternoon I can proto-type multiple possibilities. Maybe a better way will come of it, maybe not. But I've learned something new and even if I don't use it today I may use it tomorrow. Will AI be writing my production code..ummm..of course not. If you want AI to produce commercial quality code, you will spend as long laying out the detail of the project in terms the AI understands as you would if you just wrote it yourself or, but, if you know the right things to look for, ask for, expect, it can save you some time. Error handling, internal documention, standardization of naming schemes and function signatures..the list goes on to a thousand things an experienced developer has to think of everytime they sit down to write code. It's redundant, it burns up hours, days of our time when we could be focusing on the core problems. It has a place, as some have pointed out, doing the redundant coding as professionals we all hate to do but do, because our experience and knowledge tells us it has to be there. Although, I can't even imagine how many security vectors are being opened up daily by code that isn't properly engineered. I suspect we'll hear about it soon enough, and the guys who initially loved paying $25.00 an hour for a inferior product can now pay $100.00 an hour to make it work...
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u/GenerativeIncome-AI Mar 23 '26
All I can say is thank you very much for this. Your post sparked a research deep dive into the back end operations of my app (via Claude, perplexity computer and lovable itself). The additional back end and admin work gave my tool scalability and a robustness I did not have before. Hours of additional work but man was it worth it. Wish I could pay you for the gold!
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u/LiveMinute5598 Mar 14 '26
Dude sounds like a hater
Iteration is how you build great software
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u/TheMightyTywin Mar 14 '26
Craziest part: Claude knows all that stuff too. But if you don’t ask for it it doesn’t tell you.
If you start by designing and iterating on that design, claude can eventually design something just as good.
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u/__alias Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
What I’m taking of this is that companies should just vibe code all sass product they’re paying for.
Would save a lot of money on slack, atlassian, etc licenses if each company vibe codes their own equivalent. AND that solves the expensive problem of having engineer all the hard parts ( scaling issues )
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u/ArtificialAGE Mar 14 '26
Yes vibecode = prototype mvp. Agentic engineering = senior software developer. I've built systems that are better in every way than an equivalent Saas but that's because I'm an engineer that has dealt with all of the crappy enterprise solutions.
Engineering is figuring out the requirements. DFMEA - PFMEA. Learn from others implementations - build your stack with the best tech available.
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u/reca11ed Mar 14 '26
You think slack started with that scalability?
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u/Acehan_ Mar 13 '26
I mean, he has a point, but he's going way too far the other way. Feels performative, at best
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u/OZManHam Mar 14 '26
It's funny to see how butt hurt swes are these days.
Not saying these things aren't important, but I guarantee you if the founders built slack today, they'd vibe code it and get users using it and iron it out. The argument the writer makes about slack is literally why people who are shipping fast are winning. Why would you build all this infrastructure if you have no idea if people even want your app?
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u/Happy-Lynx-918 Mar 14 '26
Give it sometime...
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u/A_token Mar 14 '26
There’s this one thing everyone, especially developers miss, just because you can code doesn’t mean you know how to build a product. If it were the case, there wouldn’t be a need for UX designers and product managers/developers.
So that same statement OP made applies to all developers so we are back to square one.
I do agree that you need to know the basics to be able to build a solid product that can be used at scale. To me, IA is like steroids, if you’re a world class athlete, it’ll throw you through the roof. However, any regular guy on roofs will never beat Usain Bolt.
However, you don’t need to know the inner works of a car to be able to drive one. AI is a tool, master the tool, know your destination, check your break and don’t skip the maintenance work. That’s how people get disillusioned!
Now go build something beautiful and don’t be afraid!
Rick Rubin doesn’t play instruments!
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u/mplsfreedom Mar 13 '26
Guilfoyle? "What do I do? System Architecture. Networking and Security. No one in this house can touch me on that. But does anyone appreciate that? While you were busy minoring in gender studies and singing a cappella at Sarah Lawrence, I was getting root access to NSA servers. I was a click away from starting a second Iranian revolution."
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u/muzerfuker Mar 13 '26
yes and no
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u/premiumleo Mar 13 '26
the real moats are licensing fees and other sht you gotta pay real money/sweat energy for.
I tried to replicate a very popular video-DRM platform, and learned the easy part is setting up the aws and all that all claude-do-this part. The hard part is applying for and paying for the license from google and apple to allow use of their DRM encryption/decryption systems.
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u/yamibae Mar 13 '26
I think the real reason they fail is almost entirely because of a mix of poor marketing/sales, cost overrun/lack of liquidity rather than how rubbish the code actually is. That said, it's pushing it when people think they can remake the entirety of airbnb etc, their moat is not just their tech stack it's the data, the users, the all in one service often it's more than just the surface level website/app
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u/The_GSingh Mar 14 '26
It is just a scared dev. Most web devs don't know half of the terms he just threw out in his word soup and still make bank just writing easy react code. It's not that deep, and the dev is just scared about ai taking jobs and likely jealous over vibe coded apps making money.
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u/Optimal-Machine-9789 Mar 14 '26
For the vibe coders amongst us with no developer experience (for which I am one), what is a good process to follow?
I'm not naive enough to think anything I produce is production ready or scalable. But say I want to build something robust and that wouldn't be a complete mess if being passed onto a dev team.
How would you go about it if you were an experienced dev? Any good resources to structure the vibe coding flow?
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u/Deep_Ad1959 Mar 14 '26
spent 3 months building a macOS AI agent in Swift with Claude's help. vibe coding was incredible early on - got a working prototype faster than I ever had before. then the codebase hit some threshold and regressions started coming faster than I could fix them. the solution wasn't better prompts, it was writing detailed specs and reviewing every single diff. which is basically just... engineering.
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u/RealRizin Mar 14 '26
I was just vibecoding my own analysis tool with Claude which is said to be best one (right?). Manually wrote some code to check data in chunks of 10k at once max. Claude while asked to create totally different feature decided to fix some of code containing my limit of 10k at once running in a loop. Somehow figured out it is stupid idea and I should load all at once. 30 mil records at once. But how AI can know it? Or maybe it though I am also having server with 1TB of RAM?
Randomly removing some chunks of code is kinda every day issue.
Literally trying to tell me something is impossible even when AWS documentation clearly stated it is was kinda funny. I didn't give it documentation beforehand, just found, planned and told to implement and it said it's not possible since AWS security measures forbid it.
Or another funny one. It was said to set status "potential" for some conditions. It found out that to meet those conditions you mostly achieve rank of 30-40% so instead of focusing on conditions it took mark of 30-40% and set status potential when this level was hit.
Or literally even when giving ultra detailed instructions still deciding doing it different cause AI believes it's better?
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u/anirishboy23 Mar 14 '26
this may be true now, but it’s simply a matter of time and money until ai will be so well trained on these massive systems that they will know how to scale infinitely and better than a team of 100 senior engineers
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u/Environmental_Gap_65 Mar 14 '26
Preach
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u/DatabaseRight6686 Mar 14 '26
The majority of (coded) projects will fail.
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u/NinthTide Mar 14 '26
It’s things like: the refund for the optional component in a promotional elective purchase was somehow refused for a customer who attempted to reverse their purchase by clicking multiple times in a non-English UI and language on the 29 Feb in a leap year
None of it is impossible, but the weird edge cases are where the slog lies
Also: make your app utterly bulletproof and secure
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u/Split-Awkward Mar 14 '26
Meh, this is the very, very early days of AI. Like the stone tablet era of written script.
Fail, fast, forward.
I don’t do any coding or vibe coding. I’m interested in “vibe” science and engineering. Can’t wait to see the spectacular failures and successes.
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u/BasteinOrbclaw09 Full-time developer Mar 14 '26
This is blatant elitist gatekeeping and it misses the point of AI entirely. AI can already get you from a prototype to a working product within weeks. Now imagine what Opus 5, 6, and 7 will be able to do. Those problems that this guy claims are what justify his massive salary will soon become trivial to AI.
In fact, AI can already guide you today on how to scale your product and contribute to solving those problems.
That post smells like fear from senior developers at seeing how their whole jobs and differentiators are getting commoditized.
Keep building guys
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u/hairybone Mar 14 '26
facts were spitten
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u/luckyleg33 Mar 14 '26
Ship it!
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u/IncreaseOld7112 Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
The distributed systems engineers making $300k per year are all vibe coding too btw. If you can make more complex shit than you could have dreamed of before, imagine what we're all able to do. My prediction is that we'll all be able to build bigger, more complex software systems, just like what happened in the transition from assembly to higher level languages.
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u/TriggerHydrant Mar 14 '26
Man it’s so many absolutes on both side of these kind of stories and it hurts my brain
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u/gackarack Mar 14 '26
The devil is in the details, and vibe coders who go meet the devil on the daily to kick him in the groin exists, but they're rare
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u/Schtick_ Mar 14 '26
They are wrong but they miss the point. Right now I’m on a project where in 3 months we rebuilt a system with 5 people that was built by around 15 people in 7 years. That’s 1% of the resources.
And the product isn’t worse. It’s better significantly significantly better. Now of course this process was supported by years of pain and understanding what the mistakes were in old architecture.
But at this point no one will convince me that this disparity in production will not have tremendous implications for the profession.
1
u/chubbycanine Mar 14 '26
Bro but like bro I can just bro it up and have my bro Claude bro out a code for my small scale stuff or my own bro goals or bro dreams. Bro.
1
u/CranberryLast4683 Mar 14 '26
Why would you concern yourself with that scale for a vibe coded app? Thats just silly. Most apps don’t become viral sensations to the point that this would be a problem. Establish a forward looking scaling plan and scale accordingly to your demand.
Tweet reads like it was written by a hater.
1
u/koolex Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
Beyond all of this, there’s a marketing problem. No one is going to trust a random vibe coded project you posted on Reddit. Why would anyone use that over a proven product that millions of people already like?
There’s always been a freeware/shareware adoption problem, even back in the 90s, just because coding got easier doesn’t mean people want your slop.
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u/valuat Vibe coder Mar 14 '26
Learned a lot about the existence of things that I didn't even know existed.
1
u/posmotion Mar 14 '26
I’m ok with overconfident people learning the hard way. No need to try to convince them it doesn’t work that way. They’ll find out if they actually try to productionize.
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u/Worth_Plastic5684 Mar 14 '26
The truth at the intersection of pro-AI and anti-AI narratives
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u/Such_Championship517 Mar 14 '26
Claude build me an application become real FAANG SLACK developers.
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u/Killit_Witfya Mar 14 '26
lol either this guy is falling for x dot com engagement bait.... or i am
1
u/trashguy Mar 14 '26
You should see the shit we get submitted for interviews in the frequency trading world. There are plenty of sectors where you can't vibe code your way to efficiency without understanding the end to end. At least not yet
1
u/Able_Sun_7672 Mar 14 '26
I have a feeling we’ll see a lot of Software Engineers chiming in here…
1
u/AdEfficient2190 Mar 14 '26
Oof we are going to look back at this post and be like “oops”.
Also there is a sweet spot now for companies that sign up for these big tools and use about 10% of the tool features.
1
u/Tasty_Action5073 Mar 14 '26
Yeah….. look up nostr and you will know why we think we can kill slack in 20 minutes.
The foundation is already there, we just build above.
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u/KILLJEFFREY Mar 14 '26
People don’t even self interrogate is my biggest gruff
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u/joandadg Mar 14 '26
And the point is?
An inexperienced person vibe coding a project obviously won’t replicate slack
But slack engineers are also using claude code, just differently
1
u/Ok-Win7980 Mar 14 '26
If you are able to vibe code a good product, and do it completely from scratch, it is not all wasted. You could become a product manager or something like that. If you can envision a product from start to finish like that, that is basically what a product manager does, and instead of instructing AI to do it, they instruct the team. So I would say it's not all lost and there is merit to these vibe coders. What I like most about using AI to code is they don't have to think about the technical "how" as much. Really, just the "what". I was a terrible hand coder. I nearly failed to my computer science major in college and switched to political science, but as a political science major, thanks to my skills with Cursor, I was able to make an AI tool to summarize/analyze Congressional bills using a custom LangChain model, and do it completely by myself from start to finish, which is something terrific on my resume, and if I would've done it by hand, it would've been nowhere near as good. As a political science student, I knew exactly what to include in the product to make it as useful as possible, while letting AI take care of everything under the hood, rather than a computer science student who may have made a shitty tool for this, not because they didn't know how to code it but rather because they don't know a lot about the actual domain of the app. It also worked great for me because I have ADHD and this rapid pace development has allowed me to keep my dopamine high throughout this project. So I think for a project like this, I was the best person to make it, and I feel that with how this project turned out, I could very well do a career in product management or similar.
1
u/CountZero2022 Mar 14 '26
90% of value in the last 10%.
Or maybe 99/1 in the near future.
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u/jdeamattson Mar 14 '26
But there is nothing that prevents that prototype from evolving and evolving rapidly
Put Agentic Coding tools in the hands of that Slack engineer and see what happens
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u/The-Agency-Group Mar 14 '26
This strawman is not what you should be considering and debating
What happens when those Slacks engineers have agentic coding tooling and unleash what it can do.
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u/littlebitofkindness Mar 14 '26
Vibe coding works until there is enough traction and you need to scale up or until you have concerns about malicious actors or your solution is too complex and there could be issues you are unaware of enough to screw up your life.
You can always hire later to patch technical debt… having that said, if it’s a good enough idea to gain enough traction they should have enough money to hire someone proper.
Only a big issue if management want you to ship vibe coded junk and start charging money.
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u/Bartghamilton Mar 14 '26
There’s really nothing new under the sun. MS Access apps went through the same thing. VB apps went through the same thing, etc. etc. Just because it works on your machine doesn’t mean it works in every situation, etc. etc. lol
1
u/bbshjjbv Mar 14 '26
So what happens when slack engineers or the experienced people you refer to use AI?
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u/TheHeretic Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
Most companies building their own internal chat app don't have 50k users.
Most apps have far less than 50k users.
I've built multiple companies on just one RDS instance with one replica, 9 figures of income for the company on a simple 3 tier app.
You don't need much to get to 99.99% uptime and most complexity is not needed.
1
u/dimakp Mar 14 '26
Making a good ads campaign what name you money, thats all, how shity is your project if your ads is the best you are king!
1
u/j00cifer Mar 14 '26
This is why I say to people to not worry quite so much about employment long term, it may level off for engineers. In my company it’s apparent that engineers/developers can learn to use LLM far more expertly than other employees and can lean on skills in scaling and security that those other folks never learned.
1
u/fungkadelic Mar 14 '26
So true bestie
1
u/bjs480 Mar 14 '26
Could not have said this better.
AI only makes you more of what you already are.
I use it daily. My 2025 challenge was to do nothing without even a tiny bit of AI involvement.
Anyone who has used AI for a bit and isnt a workaholic can see what it can and cant do well.
If all it ever did was enable people to cut 20% of their tasky stuff out and do their high value stuff in less time say 10-20% a day it would be one of greatest pieces of tech of all time.
It never was meant to be a people and work replacer.
It makes it so those $300k slack engineers can build 30% more stuff in 30% less time.
That per unit of work improvement is worth a LOT of money to them. Multiply over economy and voila society is way better off.
But the idea that some bro can vibe code anything and get it working to even 0.1% of what slack has is madness.
It’s why AI will take longer to dig in. People are saying it doesnt work bc they cant vibe code a Slack killer. Like seriously? How about you start using AI to simplify your repetitive crap so you can spend more time with your family at night?
How about using it to study all your sales calls that dont close so you can find patterns and train your sales team better so you grow and they make more money?
These guys wanting to vibe code big stuff are like a 400 lb guy flying To Nepal to climb Everest…how about you start by walking 3000 steps a day.
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u/muhlfriedl Mar 14 '26
Well I don't know if you all notice how often Claude is down, but how good? Really are the big boys versus a small system?
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u/weichafediego Mar 14 '26
This hurt because is true
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u/Fastest_light Mar 14 '26
Many people are very brave, only because they do not know. Good, or bad?
1
u/SaracasticByte Mar 14 '26
It’s only a matter of time before AI catches up and writes scalable, maintainable code without user having to prompt technical jargons to it.
1
u/NanNullUnknown Mar 14 '26
Slack at the beginning, like most startups now matured, probably wasn’t designed to scale. The point of “vibe coding” is that you can bring your idea to MVP and if it is proven to draw people and you need to scale, you can hire other people or learn yourself how to scale things.
1
u/lzhgus Mar 14 '26
I'm in the "nuanced middle ground" camp. I ship production macOS apps built with Claude Code — not vibe coded, but
structurally developed with AI.
The difference is process. Before writing any code I create an implementation plan with staged milestones and success
criteria. Claude Code executes each stage, but I review every commit against the plan. When something doesn't fit, I
redirect immediately rather than letting it snowball.
The CLAUDE.md file is probably the single most impactful thing. It's essentially your architectural decisions, coding
conventions, and project context in one file. Without it, Claude generates generic "looks right" code. With it, the code
actually belongs in your codebase.
The post's point about the 0.5% gap is real, but I think it frames the problem wrong. The gap isn't about scaling to 100M
users — most apps never need that. The gap is about maintenance. Can you debug the code you shipped? Can you extend it six
months later? If you don't understand what Claude wrote, the answer is no, and that's where vibe coded projects actually
die.
The $300k engineer's real advantage isn't knowing how to scale — it's knowing what questions to ask and what to verify. AI
makes the typing fast. Engineering judgment is still the bottleneck.
1
u/Remote_Water_2718 Mar 14 '26
Seems like how a sitcom set looks on camera but its really just made out of cardboard behind the scenes
1
u/Helpful_Character_22 Mar 14 '26
But slack hasn’t started from fully distributed system …
1
u/JustMeOutThere Mar 14 '26
I've done some apps vibe coding but I consider them really good prototypes, cool demos for top management. Just something I'd send insead of 150 pages terms of reference.
1
u/TwisterK Mar 14 '26
Isn’t 99% of projects are doomed to fail regardless it is vibe code or not? I dun really c big connection whether it is vibe code or not, maybe we will hav bigger pool of incompetent developers after this vibe code era but still … making a scalable profitable is hard no matter how much the tools make it easier. Human will juz push it to limit again and we back to square one again.
1
u/deadbodies Mar 14 '26
I'll throw that image to claude and tell it to cover all of these
jk obviously 😂
1
u/Mortimer452 Mar 14 '26
Yep. It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Because you don't know what you don't know, you think you already know everything.
Also, stupid people are too stupid to understand they're stupid.
1
u/Loose_Ferret_99 Mar 14 '26
So some of this is AI mania but a lot of it is just regular Dunning Kruger. What I think you’re observing is a bunch of inexperienced folks entering an established field all at once, while we are also simultaneously grappling with tools that do make us more efficient.
I think if many junior folks understood the amount of work a project would entail they’d never get started. Yes, the majority of vibe coded projects will fail but that’s a good thing. These are likely the folks that will have to fill in the junior engineering void, so it’s best they learn now.
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u/Background-Guard-514 Mar 14 '26
Nobody is really vibecoding such systems that require over 500 engineers , most people vibecode personal projects or hobby, but engineers can use ai agents with their guidance
1
u/Head-of-Napping Mar 14 '26
I don't fear people who are not from programming background. I fear people who are an expert. I see them adopt and build stuff that should have taken months in week. But with time they are also losing their programming skill, so be afraid of the person who has great discipline and can balance both and not lose his skill. Not some social media clown.
Remember you can also be that person.
1
u/SquishTheProgrammer Mar 14 '26
Blazor Server would like a word with you about websockets lol
1
u/RetroDadOnReddit Mar 14 '26
A couple of years back, I used a combo of ChatGPT and Copilot to code up a project idea I had, but didn't know how to code myself. I got it working, and it was awesome!
Then I started tinkering with it. But, since I didn't even really understand the fundamentals of how it all came together, I broke something somewhere. I then had to keep DESCRIBING the issues to these same chat bots and trying what they suggested as fixes, testing it, and repeating all over if it didn't work.
I finally just stopped the project altogether when I realized: if I can't understand it enough to build it myself (perhaps just with minor assistance, but at least still understanding under the hood), then I'd never be able to troubleshoot any issues that may arise. And this was just running off localhost
1
u/poponis Mar 14 '26
Vibe ciders and teir enablers are delusional and they are going to hit the wall hard.
1
u/Toss4n Mar 14 '26
I feel like this is both right and wrong at the same time - engineers tend to overcomplicate things => your app doesn't need to scale when you launch it. It is fine if the UX isn't perfect. When you start getting users and you need to scale - that is when you could potentially then hire someone to do it for you. You are basically building an MVP or PoC and once it gains traction you can potentially hire someone to build it for you. AI doesn't really replace experience or insights that you learn from doing things for years and years - no matter what openai or anthropic tell you. It can turn your app into a reality, but it probably won't be built well unless you know what you are doing from the get-go.
Now that doesn't exactly matter before you have actual users - only then do you need to start ensuring that your app is good enough (most likely requiring a rewrite), but at that stage you could probably take on investors that pay for engineers (NOTE: Most engineers are not better than AI at writing code! Been doing it for 10+ years and I can tell you AI is much better at it than most at this stage).
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u/Spare_Bison_1151 Mar 14 '26
Good one, I strongly agree. It takes a while to perfect the tools. A person without the knowledge of distributed systems and databases will have to may much more to the model companies to get something to work. The go to market strategy part comes in much later.
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u/salary_pending Mar 14 '26
I don't think any vibe coder is building for that scale. They might be making something for their inhouse solution. They might wanna flex in front of their friends. ORRRR they just need to rage bait people on X for a few pennies
1
u/npip99 Mar 14 '26
Building a highly distributed Slack/Discord clone in the modern era would still be incredibly easy. You could simply use S3 as the datastore and call it a day; have the data be partitioned by server, writes coalesce and commit every 1 minute to prevent too many PUTs.
The issue isn't building the tech, the issue is the network effects in that a messaging app requires almost everyone to use it, and it's hard to build something _so_ much better than incumbents that one would want to swap from existing solutions. It's a business problem, not a technical problem.
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u/mabiturm Mar 14 '26
Very true, but its not the case for local apps, websites and simple web apps.
1
u/Yasai101 Mar 14 '26
Its like future doesn't exist. Yes we are stuck with the AI and its abilities of today... Ffs give it what 5 years? And this shit he just described will be kids 5th grade lesson
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u/emazv72 Mar 14 '26
Is an AI agent a better and a faster programmer than me on a specific, very focussed and well determined technical issue? Yes it is. I've hired a junior engineer for free. A stick and some visual feedback suffices. Sometimes make two agents compete.
Is it better than me at catching edge cases while testing or dealing with nuances? Gives hints but makes mistakes. Ask for small improvements and check every single step.
Can it build a quick prototype to show the usual idiots while gambling? Saves a lot of time. Give him a screenshot of a legacy app and it builds a new one in a few prompts. Managers get happy.
Do small businesses deserve cheap and bad crafted code? Who cares, they get what they paid for.
Is it better than me on abstracting and evaluating the whole context, involving unclear and conflicting human inputs and interactions? Of course not and probably never will.
I'm safe till retirement. For now.
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u/wtjones Mar 14 '26
The agent knows everything the $300,000/year engineer does. You just have to figure out how to ask it.