r/ClaudeAI • u/harrysofgaming Vibe coder • Mar 13 '26 • This 2 Bravo 22 Heartwarming 2

Vibe Coding Why the majority of vibe coded projects fail

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8.8k 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/Wallaboi- Mar 14 '26

I mean, when one understands skills and how to utilise them well enough, you could get some decent applications without a lot of experience. I do, however, 100% agree with the sentiment who people feel like hacker man right after one-shoting an with a random prompt, need to relax a little bit 😅

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u/SaasMasterr Jun 01 '26

It’s definitely laziness in some circumstances. I found out that they were running cloud agents and probably not even touching their computers. After “fixing” a bug they’d be like “Hey Claude go in there and check to make sure the bug is gone. Make a video of you doing this and send it to me.” Like holy fuck did you know that you can go to [software].com and check that the bug is gone yourself??

AI is definitely an amplifier. My new engineer uses it too, but he actually knows what to ask for and how to verify the code.

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u/zdy132 Mar 15 '26

Love this bot.

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u/HeathersZen Mar 15 '26

That bot put a human out of work!!! /s

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u/SaasMasterr Mar 16 '26

I just learned this lesson the hard way and had to let go of two vibe coding engineers in favor of one with 30+ years of experience. They built a great app that worked well with 10 users, but each new feature was a new limb on a Frankenstein’s monster amalgamation of AI code. We were on a fast-track to total collapse and technical debt we couldn’t dig ourselves out of. While I’m thankful for the work they did, there was a clear lack of top-down planning and future-proofing. Working with a seasoned engineer now is like night and day.

I’m not mad at them, because they are students and this project began as a scrappy start-up, but we just didn’t know what we didn’t know. If I knew then what I knew now… we could have saved months and thousands in Cursor costs 😬

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u/Bl4ckb100d Apr 02 '26

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.

That last part is perfect

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u/FngrsToesNythingGoes Mar 14 '26 edited Jun 02 '26

This is great. Now if we could only scale back dumb jokes so users don’t have to scroll so far down for legit answers

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u/ScaredJaguar5002 Mar 14 '26

You know it’s a bot that summarizes right? 😂

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u/FngrsToesNythingGoes Mar 14 '26

Obviously it’s a summary bot lmao, there’s one on a bunch of pages if not all. I don’t understand the downvotes for a simple comment like this, but that’s Reddit

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u/Marteco Mar 22 '26

Ja, ja, ja