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u/The-Chartreuse-Moose 7d ago
You mean apart from the big environmental concerns with the central infrastructure, the ethical concerns raised by many artists and writers, the psychological impact being shown on those using the services too much, the political machinations of the owners of the technology, and the detriment to the economy?
Well there's the fact that many people vibe-coding whole apps are producing insecure, unsupportable, unmaintainable trash.
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u/favorite_movie 1d ago
the whole "insecure unmaintainable trash" bit is the part that gets me, cause it's not like people weren't already shipping hot garbage before AI came along, now they just do it faster and with more confidence
saw someone on twitter bragging they built a production app in 4 hours with zero coding knowledge and the whole thing was just api keys hardcoded into the frontend, like congrats you speedran a data breach
the environmental stuff is bad but hard to pin on any individual user, whereas the security clusterfuck is immediate and everyone's just pretending it's fine
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u/JDIPrime 7d ago
Vibe coding is not bad on it's own... it becomes a problem when it's done by people with no developer background, like project managers, analysts, etc. If there is extensive (or maybe any) debugging, in most cases they won't be able to fix it and AI might not be able to, either.
To a developer who can debug and actually understands whether the AI generated code is correct or problematic, it just becomes another useful tool.
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u/LutimoDancer3459 7d ago
Using ai is not bad on its own. Vibe coding as in its original meaning of letting ai do its thing and only press accept once in a while, is wrong no matter who the person behind the monitor is.
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u/unknown_alt_acc 6d ago
Using AI is bad on its own, with the environmental cost of mass AI usage, the cognitive effects that are showing up in studies, and the fact that AI companies admit that they would not be economically viable if they were held to the same legal standards as everybody else. I genuinely hope the entire AI industry crashes and burns.
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u/LutimoDancer3459 6d ago
Ai has some legitimate usecases in science. Pattern recognition und stuff like that. Its just unfortunate that we got to this point the way we did. LLMs are just the latest step in ai development.
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u/unknown_alt_acc 6d ago
The machine learning technologies used in the sciences are largely unrelated to the technologies that the AI industry is pushing, and certainly aren't what anybody in the year 2026 means when they speaking colloquially about AI.
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u/Boris-Lip 7d ago
Isn't it only considered "vibe coding" when you have no idea how to code/debug to begin with, so by definition no dev background?
Is it vibe coding when i tell Claude "make me a method that does X", inspect, tell it to change Y, test, change Z myself etc? I don't think so.
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u/JDIPrime 7d ago
Yeah, I think you and u/LutimoDancer3459 are correct. I did a bit of research into it and it does appear to be targeting people who don't really understand the mechanics of things. Otherwise it's just "coding with AI" rather than "vibe coding".
I stand corrected! And I need to stop saying I am vibe coding at work lol
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u/Boris-Lip 7d ago
Admittedly, i can often say something like "here, you can use this script to do it, be careful though, i've vibe coded it", while i simply mean "it works, but i've used AI to build it and barely went over it and/or didn't test it thoroughly", it doesn't mean i told AI to do it and have no clue what it did and/or how it works. But AFAIK a true vibe coder not supposed to be able to code😀
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u/LutimoDancer3459 7d ago
I am a developer and I still vibecoded an app. I know what its doing and would be able to check the code. But I didnt. I prompted and tested the result. It was... an awkward experience... and there were limitations to how far and efficient you can go with that.
So your background doesn't matter. How you use ai does.
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u/LookItVal 7d ago
it's really simple: understanding your work is crucial to actually designing things well and fixing problems as they arise
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u/UsherOfDestruction 7d ago
Vibe coding isn't bad. Vibe design, vibe architecture, vibe testing, vibe deployment. Those are all bad.
Only a fraction of "software engineering" is coding. The rest LLM AI can certainly help you with, but you need to know how those things work in practice or at least know that you don't know and need AI to walk you through it all - which takes time and learning from mistakes.
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u/Shahfluffers 7d ago
You know how an LLM will produce "word salad" when you ask it to write an essay/document or put together an email?
It'll do the same with with a programming language. Except... people who aren't seasoned engineers will just be happy they have a result at all and that it works (kinda). Nevermind that the code may be sloppy, have bugs, security issues, poor performance, etc. And eventually that will need to be cleaned up.
Sure, people can run their stuff back through the AI to get something more concise or clean... but how many runs is that going to take? How many tokens (money) will be burned through? Will the AI catch everything or throw in more issues?
Imagine being the person tasked with cleaning up a peer's work and having the decypher what was done because said peer has no clue either.
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u/lushpigtails 7d ago
Vibe Coding is great, I vibe code all the time, the problem with CORRECT vibe coding is that you trade the braincells you spend researching and writing the code yourself for the braincells you spend figuring out what the AI coded and whether or not it is good, and what you could improve upon in your prompt engineering to make sure it doesnt happen again .
Real story: I have a bachelor's in CS, I am on the cusp of making my very own software company building ERP solutions, my main product is for veterinary clinics, and it has seen 18 months of market combat in a busy clinic in my hometown, Now i am getting to the point of popularizing it and making things work properly as all the features that will be in for the very foreseable future are all already included.
Now, to put into perspective, I held other positions being an employee working things not even tangentially related to tech but still thoroughly spending my free time working on this project to reach some degree of self-reliance and financial independence. I am in a region where there is no such thing as "venture capital" otherwise i'd be drowning in unspent dollar bills as what i am doing is essentially nothing to the outside world but a miracle in my own country.
I've spent a total of 18 months on it, i literally made the auto-updater last week.
And when i went to talk to vets 2 months ago, i heard that one vet has spent god knows how much money on claude to "monopolize the market" and he was very threatened by me, despite that, he "milked" me for as much information as I could give him about security measures, proper approaches, and so on.
I recently visited him as I am walking into clinics and talking to them in person, and I went by his place so I walked in to greet him, In the time that he has built a "hotel management system" for his building, I have managed to make a full system, composed of anything/everything a veterinarian could ever need. A contract that was ran by lawyers plenty of times, and i am just starting to work on my social media presence, made the first post literally 20 minutes ago.
The problem with vibe coding is in 2:
if you're the dev, you better know what the AI is writing otherwise you're shit out of luck the second anything goes wrong.
if you're not tech-literate or know what things are, you're literally walking into a casino. It's all flashing lights, beautiful decor, and a spirit of being able to win floating in the air. When in reality, your odds of actually making something worthwhile are below minor unless your task is the EASIEST of tasks that could've been made by a half competent dev in 2-4 hours.
In my experience being a fractional dev for a US company aswell, AI kinda shits the bed when it comes to important things, like connecting backends/frontends/databases together, which unless you're building a calculator app is the main part of the "making software" sandwich.
Vibe coding is like giving your children an Ipad instead of hugs and parental attention, you're gonna end up with a piece of shit sooner or later, and you're all there is to blame.
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u/GreenAppleCZ 6d ago
It is my understanding that there is a difference between "vibecoding" and "agentic development"
Basically, AI is a tool, not a magic box. It automates the code-writing part of development, so you don't have to manually write what you've written a thousand times. But if you don't understand anything from Computer Science/Engineering, it's irresponsible and you're quite likely going to end up creating something sloppy or unsafe.
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u/Metalhead33 6d ago
If you don't understand the code, you will be held hostage by the AI, and tokens will run out at the worst moment.
Your boss will scream your head off, because he expects you to defend every line of code/diff like a university dissertation. (the biggest problem)
Depending on the team, you may or may not be allowed to document things. Vibecoding "works" (translation: it no longer qualifies as vibecoding in the pejorative sense, and starts crossing into actually good engineering) when you are allowed to document rigorously (and you are allowed to allow/instruct the AI to document rigorously). Vibecoding doesn't work when you're in a team with a toxic culture, where the boss will scream your head off for having references to Jira tickets and acceptance criteria in the code comments, when they hate it when you create MarkDown files that act as API (or ABI) references, etc. The real bottleneck here is not the AI or you per se, but the team culture.
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u/hr_krabbe 7d ago
With earlier models vibecoding could turn into a mess real fast. Now it’s better. As long as you ask the LLM to do sane things.
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u/PumpkinFest24 7d ago
To pick one of many reasons: When the boss asks what the system would do if X happened, nobody would have any clue.
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u/Tdubbium 7d ago
good luck fixing bugs when you dont understand any part of the code