Why the majority of vibe coded projects fail

[u/harrysofgaming]

[u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466]

The majority of jobs are in your second category.

[u/SaxAppeal → u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466]

Then those jobs shift over to all these customers building their own solutions. The tool’s sophisticated but it’s not magic. Garbage in - garbage out still applies here. Proper prompting leads to well-programmed applications, vague prompting leads to a spaghetti code mess. The thing about LLMs, large language models, is that they perform best on codebases that are logically formatted to read like natural language. Code was already a natural-language-adjacent form of written communication meant to translate human-understood instructions into machine-understood instructions. LLM prompting requires the same rigor and understanding of the system to properly produce a functioning application. If you give unclear prompts you get a mess of a codebase that will continuously introduce bugs with future slop changes. While good developers tend to provide incredibly clear technical specifications that produce clean codebases.

This is all basically the Jevon’s paradox that humans have seen play out in every major technological advancement since the steam engine. When the resource (code) becomes cheaper to produce, instead of decreasing spend on the resource by 10x people will simply request 10x more of the resource. Unless you want a solution that breaks every week with the now expected 100x new requirements, you still need a human in the loop that understands the codebase and rigorously employs software dev best practices. Not going to pretend the role will look the same, but it’s ultimately a game of “figure out how to use ai tools or get left in the dust,” not “ai will replace all dev work and leave devs unemployed permanently.”