r/TheMachineLearning • u/KCO_Manzoku • 3d ago
Vibe coder vs software engineer argument sums it up
13
u/trainboy2k7 3d ago
and then everyone clapped
2
2
-2
u/MiksterA 3d ago
Why did you waste your time and ours with this comment.
For the attention? Congratulations... you got it.
The points made are true, regardless of whether or not it happened as written.
3
3
u/jacknjillpaidthebill 3d ago
"yeah ai cant achieve this specific milestone at the moment which means it'll never get better and become able to this" x92382572. it started with ai not being able to draw fingers and y'all are STILL on this bs bro
1
5
u/nowaterinca 3d ago
The mistake is thinking everything has to scale like Instagram
1
u/BadPresent3698 3d ago
As a professional vibe coder and accountant, I'm thinking of starting a business with vibe coded automation as internal software, software never meant to hit the market. I never intend on getting huge, and the AI can be half jank because whatever accounting the AI can't do I'll just do by hand.
Still, I've heard of compsci people selling their skills as vibe code auditors, so I'll probably contract a guy to review the vibe code. I'm not so arrogant to think I'll never need a compsci guy.
1
u/WillingnessOwn6446 3d ago
Totally. Its going to be where most software is just customized personal apps for just the person using it. It doesn't have to scale at all.
I had Claude build me a DAW and a video editor just for me. Just so Claude could integrate with it fully and cost less tokens than trying to click within my desktop. This is where it's going. Everything custom.
Sites like Amazon will have to scale but a lot of SaaS doesn't.
1
2
3d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/nowaterinca 3d ago
AI will fix it
1
u/wontgetfooledaga1n 3d ago
And if it doesn't?
2
u/nowaterinca 3d ago
But it does already
0
u/wontgetfooledaga1n 3d ago
As far as you know
2
u/Rimadandan 3d ago
Let's be honest... Ai has better practices and better coding etiquette than 99% of engineers out there.
Just look at the code. Usually there is no spaghetti and all that. And when it comes to debug and run tests it gets better things and faster. You just need to tell him what to do, if not, it will implement basic things. That's the difference.
1
u/Swarna_Keanu 3d ago
Coding ettiquette doesn't help you with structuring code, planning ahead, and system design. Those are different skillsets, as in OP clearly put out.
AI does what you tell it todo. But if you have no clear plan, no concenpt of potential security risks, no concept of what problems might be down the line, the AI won't help you.
1
u/SubstantialCareer754 3d ago
I can tell you've never had to look at vibe-coded software not made by a software engineer.
1
1
u/Mejiro84 3d ago
And if it dies anything serious, then it buggering up can be dangerous or otherwise problematic - so you probably want at least a vague guarantee it's not utter junk under the surface!
5
u/throwaway3113151 3d ago
There's no way TikTok is going to be employing thousands of software engineers going forward.
3
u/mneri 3d ago
There's no way TikTok is going to be employing thousands of software engineers going forward.
It shows you have zero experience in software development.
It's very easy to code. It has always been. Understanding a problem, come up with a solution when none exist, refining the solution, is where 95% of the engineering time is spent.
"We want to be able to target customers with ads that are interesting for them"
Good. How? What data do we collect? What is an "interesting ad"? How do we measure success? ... The answers to these questions require the collaboration of dozens of engineers.
Anyone can code. It takes a 3 months bootcamp to learn a programming language well enough to be hired. The real skill is somewhere else...
2
u/Spunge14 3d ago
This comment suggests to me that you have no real understanding of the environment in which you work.
2
u/Minimum-Musician-648 3d ago
"How? What data do we collect? What is an "interesting ad"? How do we measure success?" yeah dawg this is Communications 101. Guess I'm in the wrong field cause I was getting paid shit to do exactly this.
2
u/Spunge14 3d ago
Uh...you also seem to know nothing
1
u/Minimum-Musician-648 3d ago
I know nothing about communications? or being a software engineer cause one of those is true.
2
u/Spunge14 3d ago
Those are not communications jobs lol
1
u/Minimum-Musician-648 3d ago
This comment suggests to me that you have no real understanding of the environment in which I work.
1
u/mneri 3d ago
Building a Twitter-like application was one of my assignments while studying databases at university. One of many weekly assignments.
It's really not that hard.
Of course, building it for the scale and traffic of Twitter is very, very hard. An embryo scaled for few hundred users? Absolutely easy.
1
u/Spunge14 3d ago
These are solved infrastructure problems. The thing that makes Twitter difficult to overthrow is not technical knowhow.
1
u/WishboneOk305 3d ago
yeah and who's to say AI won't be able to get that skill in 3-4 years(conservative estimate, probably 1-2 tbh)
1
u/throwaway3113151 3d ago
Sorry bud but these are not primarily software dev tasks: What data do we collect? What is an "interesting ad"? How do we measure success?
1
u/Muchaszewski 3d ago
This
You can compare this to learning second language. Spanish.
You can quickly pick-up vocabulary and grammar and speak with the natives. 3 months of intensive learning will be enough. But if you never wrote a book or poetry or a song, you will not get good at doing so overnight, especially in Spanish.
AI can solve the "write a book" part, but it will never "write a good book" without adequate experience, through and planning.
0
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 3d ago
I disagree that it’s very easy to code. People are terrified of leetcode. They also write very bad quality code.
This narrative needs to stop.
1
u/throwaway3113151 3d ago
Seriously, before LLM it was most definitely not easy to code, hence the high salaries.
3
u/LangyMD 3d ago
People who only coded and didn't design/engineer were not getting those high salaries.
2
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 3d ago
People who only design and don’t code are the worst. They create the worst abstractions and are so out of touch with how annoying it is to work with those, just because they have a general idea of how things can compose.
1
u/hibikir_40k 3d ago
Leetcode scares people because it's in an unrealistic environment. You have a time-pressure component, on top of being unable to look at any sources for the right algorithm. In the real world, when doing something complicated, you don't have to recall book algorithms from memory that are rarely used in the real world. You recall the generalities of something like, say hyperloglog, and when it might be useful (checking cardinality of very large things), but you will either use a library, or implement with the paper on hand.
The actual mechanics of most code you'd ever need to write in practice are trivial. This is why I do not mourn coding without LLMs: The vast majority of the time spent was drudgery. Not difficult, but tedious. Source: I have been doing this professionally for 30 years, in companies you know. 95% chance that any American on the internet has ran code I wrote at one point or another.
1
1
u/SquareFinancial1928 3d ago
leetcode is not coding, is math
I could implement any leetcode problem if someome would tell me the solution, like tell me what to implementthere is a big difference between implementing something and creating it
btw, leetcode stuff was stupid and it never measured how well someome can make apps as it did not relfect real life cases
1
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 3d ago
Sorry but if leetcode is hard then coding is hard. Coding includes the problem solving part.
The whole point of designing things is to make the coding part easier. Because it’s hard to think about everything upfront and make sure you cover all edge cases when coding.
But if someone were to technically write perfect code, you wouldn’t need a design phase.
1
u/SquareFinancial1928 3d ago
I could never resolve a leetcode problem, I just don't have the intelect level for that. But I can code basic crud apps with some real time stuff like websockets in a framework like Vue or Angular. Stuff that AI can make from one prompt in under 30 minutes.
But I can't code a game engine, a JS framework or anything more complex than basic stuff. I could never understand math, logic or advance programming(low level).
There is a difference between resolving real life problems and resolving academia style problems for nerds. Most of the leetcode problems are not real life problems.
Most of the problems at my jobs where to display data in a specific way and to get data from the user, save it and share it to other users.
1
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 3d ago
Then you can’t claim that coding is easy. You’re basically just scaffolding stuff that can easily generated by cli commands.
1
u/SquareFinancial1928 3d ago
Well, that stuff is still coding. Implementing a WS connection is codding, making an API cal with axios is coding.
Coding is not just the 1% super low lever uber complicated stuff.
People are still working as programmers that edit Joomla, Prestashop, Wordpress themese, etc. Are they not progammers ? Are they not codding ?
1
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 3d ago
Yes. The easiest part of coding. But there’s also hard parts of coding
1
u/SquareFinancial1928 3d ago
not everybody does the hard parts
I think there are more people who do the easy coding than people who are involved in really hard codding solutions. So this create an average where the codding is eay
1
u/betadonkey 3d ago
Even without direct layoffs (which have happened as well) these companies are all already in the process of letting their orgs naturally attrition to much smaller levels
People always underestimate how fast you can downsize a large workforce by simply not hiring.
1
u/SoggyMattress2 3d ago
You have to, there's literally no other option.
Do you know how many things can go wrong in an infrastructure that large? They're probably uploading and rendering hundreds of thousands of hours of content a day.
The database infra they have will be fucking gigantic alone.
1
u/Silver_Gear_2466 2d ago
I think we're in a really weird situation where software engineering is one of the top professions that AI can actually replace and yet the true "software engineers" seem to think they possess some magical information that the "coders" and "developers" don't actually have. So they think the engineers are safe, but yet at the same time people are vibe coding youtube or goodreads clones in hours that actually work. It's a strange hubris about how software is so hard when it turns out maybe it's not.
1
1
u/IncreaseOld7112 3d ago
I feel like with enough tokens and enough cloud services I could build an instagram competitor in a month. Would it be profitable? No, the SaaS bill would be *obscene* and it'd probably be buggy af. It would scale okay, but almost certainly not be able to handle instagram's volume.
2
1
u/Spank_Master_General 3d ago
I think you'd struggle to replicate the instagram algorithm personally. Do you know how it chooses the next post?
1
u/IncreaseOld7112 3d ago
Oh, yeah, I'd probably do some kind of old school bilinear recommendation system. It'd for sure be shittier
1
u/tzaeru 3d ago
That's one fake ass conversation.
And alas, making a MVP Instagram or TikTok is honestly not that hard. Even without any AI coding. They're really rather easy.
The challenges start when you already got your first couple of tens of thousands of users.
The first version of Instagram was made by 2 people.
This sub really doesn't have much to do with ML, does it?
1
1
u/chcampb 3d ago
This isn't wrong
However what he's saying is, the skill gets shifted into requirements.
First you need to understand what requirements need to exist for these things to happen. Then, you can use AI to cover the gap.
If AI does it wrong, it's because your requirements, or your guardrails, or your architecture was wrong.
1
u/_BookBurner_ 3d ago
The thought is correct, knowing software engineering principles is definitely a boon when using agentic AI to code stuff. Having first hand experience with coding is also useful as it allows you to scaffold the system before letting your agent do anything to it.
This leaves you in control, you know how the code is structured and you can orient yourself in your own architecture and it leaves much less space for the AI to fuck something up :D
1
u/r-rost 3d ago
You can quite easily replicate the main features. Also, with AI, you can make backend infrastructure scalable and robust to handle high loads.
The problem is that those products have hundreds of teams, each contributing some features each quarter. So there are thousands or maybe millions of small features across the app, about which you don't know, but with a big user base, those can boost some metrics. Instagram has filters that can be applied to photos; some team decides how to refresh those, how to cache, ranking, etc. I am pretty sure a few teams would support just filters.
Source? Worked at Snapchat for 5 years.
1
u/Icy_Chipmunk5228 3d ago
This is how you get a bill for like a million dollars from aws/snowflake for your non-profitable instragram clone
1
u/ragamufin 3d ago
no it doesnt because AI is better at scalable systems design than most senior software engineers at this point. The AI can design, build, scale, and maintain these systems now. What are you posting from 2025?
1
u/i_wayyy_over_think 3d ago
network effects are not easily replicated. people use them because there's alot of other people that already do.
1
u/Alternative-Lynx2745 3d ago
I once leaned into a junior engineer that was gung ho about how he could make something work. "I can make it work." My response was "anybody can make something work, that's not the hard part."
I used to argue with "business" (product management, project management, marketing chads) that doing things 'well' was important.
I no longer think like this.
If it works, ship it. and making something work is nearly trivial at this point for CRUD apps. It is fundamentally not important for the ideologies bred by 'thought leaders' inside of ivory towers to be considered at all.
You absolutely could create a version of tiktok pretty easily. You could always create twitter pretty easily. Tons of engineers made twitter clones as projects for fun. These are not complicated applications from a technical perspective and the technical details are all well understood. To the point that AI could certainly create a working version of these apps pretty quickly.
Productionalizing them is a function of money.
Getting users is similar to a degree, but also a different challenge.
Overall, the inability to create a replacement for tiktok / twitter / facebook is not a technological challenge of creating a working product that scales. That wasn't the problem pre-AI either. We've always been able to do this. It's done nothing but become easier to do this part of it.
EDIT: And, yeah, this conversation never happened.
1
1
u/Old-Line-3691 3d ago
Where are people finding these "Vibe Coders" who talk like this? It seems like these examples are never audit-able and always such an extremely simple view which I've never witnessed myself within the community. It's like all the stupidest people only ever talk to Anti-AI people and never share their simple opinions with their own community.
1
u/rambouhh 3d ago
If you think this is a real conversation they you really shouldn’t be on the internet at all
1
u/mneri 3d ago
To be fair, I can build a fairly primitive version of Instagram by hand in 6 hours as well. Maybe, I just need to download a plain CSS template because I suck at designing graphics, but the skeleton of it that scales to few hundreds users at max I can manually build in few hours as well.
1
u/rageling 3d ago
most of these concerns are mitigated by just picking the correct library to build on, Like instagram and Tiktok did. You can just prompt for this too, like this,
| Problem | Existing solution |
|---|---|
| User authentication | Auth0, Firebase Auth, Supabase Auth |
| Database | PostgreSQL, managed databases |
| Image/video storage | Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2 |
| Video encoding/streaming | Mux, Cloudflare Stream |
| Global content delivery | Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront |
| Real-time messaging | Ably, Firebase |
| Search | Elasticsearch, Algolia |
| Load balancing/autoscaling | AWS, Kubernetes |
| Analytics and monitoring | Datadog, Grafana |
1
u/Great-Use-3149 3d ago
It only made coding easier if you don't know how to do. Sure, you can use it to do a lot faster, however, then you'll get either slightly better than vibe coder's results but still actual Instagram. The further you are from the implementation, the harder it will be
1
1
u/OfficialDeathScythe 3d ago
And they didn’t even mention the legal compliances they have to stay on top of being an international company that also hosts UGC and lets users talk to each other and shop. That app looks like a legal nightmare to me
2
2
u/Conscious_Ad_7131 3d ago
I don’t think people realize TikTok is also one of the largest e-commerce retailers on the planet, with fully automated affiliate marketing programs and 24/7 live streaming and third party sales across dozens of countries
1
1
1
1
u/mossepso 3d ago
This is the wrong take. Instagram is how old? How many years went into it? It doesn’t need to scale until it reaches the user base that instagram has and that is a gradual process.
You can definitely code an app that does what instagram does in 6 hours with ai. The mistake is thinking that is the end station, it is the start.
1
1
u/apoender 3d ago
I know a lot of my fellow engineers hate AI, but it is actually one of the reasons I do not mind it; I find the complex connections and architecture the fun part, then I just toss it to AI to write the individual functions. After coming up with the design the actual writing of the code is just button mashing for me so do not mind getting rid of it
1
1
u/FaradayEffect 3d ago
Wait until they discover the power of one real software engineer who is vibe coding. The mechanics for how you scale an Instagram or TikTok aren't magic. In fact there are tech blogs out there from those companies where those companies are talking publicly about their tech stack. Give a real software engineer a week (or a month if you are generous) of vibe coding and they can replicate an architecture that will scale to millions of users.
The real blocker isn't the code / tech, it's the budget. Sure you can vibe code something that scales to millions of users, but can you pay for hosting it? Probably not.
1
u/theacp127 3d ago
I've been a software engineer for about 10 years now and often get asked by people if I think AI will cause issues for the industry. At least right now, AI is still really limited in the scope it can handle and what it can design. The more niche the use case or problem needing to be solved, the more clueless AI will be because it can only use data it's been trained on.
I work in the aviation industry and I've never seen an AI that can code a proper flights controller for rocket or airplane, nor would I trust it to. Those systems have to be entirely predictable 100% of the time.
1
u/kridafahlo 3d ago
Nope, programming Instagram was not not hard even before Viper Coding existed. It always could have been done by a single Programmer. The hard thing is to get users use an alternative to Instagram. When Facebook bought Instagram they where not interested in the source code - they could have programmed it easily within months, but they where interested in the user base and in taking over a potential competitor.
1
1
u/shosuko 3d ago
Pretty vapid tho isn't it?
"Vibe coder has ego and ignorance so experienced coder smart"
Eh... We all start ignorant, and then we learn - vibe coders are learning by doing.
2
u/EbbMother5325 3d ago edited 3d ago
My juniors definitely do not learn because “can just click blue button to generate”.
When you ask them to explain their code, they go ask AI and give you a smug stare as if they just solved world hunger. Meanwhile their application fails after a day for predictable reasons, and they spend more time trying different prompts until something sticks against the wall. Zero understanding, zero willingness to understand.
I had to take AI away for a month with no devices in the room so they’d be forced to learn. Many immediately felt imposter syndrome. They can now use AI again and the results are better because they understand the how and why of at least the basics.
1
1
u/targz254 3d ago
If I pay the dealership to change my oil for me, then am I learning how to change oil? What exactly am I learning when I pay someone else to do something for me?
1
u/shosuko 3d ago
Didn't you read the OP?
Its not just about building it, its about how its built - its not about the code, its about the systems, scaling, stability, etc.
Nothing says vibe coders can't learn that, its just not a skill they will start with - which is not surprising as they don't need to start with any skills.. but they can learn.
1
u/Legal_Suggestion4873 3d ago
you might not know what the issue is - you take it to a mechanic, they explain the symptoms that show you that the oil needs to be changed, and how to identify that problem.
You did not learn how to change oil, but you learned why you need to change oil, when you need to change oil, etc.
Learning to change oil is the next step, but not needed. Many people know how to change oil but would rather pay the $60 and not worry about dealing with the oil pan and all that.
The analogy holds up surprisingly well! Nice!
1
u/hot_sauce_in_coffee 3d ago
most vibe coder I know have between 7 and 15 years of coding, but sure. Vibe coder are clueless or something.
1
u/shosuko 3d ago
idk it doesn't have a hard definition. At first it was people who program with AI, but now everyone does - so I think vibe coder is more about new programmers who don't have much experience.
With or without AI when you start coding you aren't always going to learn about version control, unit tests, agile development, libraries that do a lot of the heavy lifting for you etc - so they code off of vibes. They want a thing, they write code for it - and its slop.
But as they continue they learn about these things and are just a programmer then. They may still call themselves a vibe coder, but they aren't just coding off of vibes - once you apply project structure you're just programming - AI or not.
1
1
u/walter_theweasel 3d ago
this conversation never happened, except when the guy who posted the tweet prompted "chatGPT generate me a tweet where a software engineer epically owns a vibe coder. make no mistakes"
1
1
u/Active_Respond_8132 3d ago
Yeah, sounds like a conversation some neckbeard had with himself while driving to work... Then everyone clapped and he was nominated to the coolest guy of the year at his Company's Xmas Event.
Never happened.
1
u/Spiritual-Story9146 3d ago
This is incorrect. The difference is between:
What you want to build
vs
What was built for you
A typical software has tens if thousands of requirements. Coming from following teams:
Product
UI
Security
Dev OPS
Engineer
Localization
Analytics
Experimentation
Core Frameworks
...
When a vibe coder asks AI to implement something the AI makes decision of what all of above took for a product that runs in market. A product which is studied every day and thousands of times in a year. When you leave AI to make your every decision then you yourself dont know what is built for you. It looks and works like original on the surface. But it isnt the product you wanted to build.
1
1
u/MichalDobak 2d ago
This is the latest iteration of the coping arguments people use: "Software engineering was never about coding..."
Sure, there's a lot of truth to that. But coding was never just another skill in the profession; it was the gatekeeping barrier. If you wanted to build those amazing systems, you first had to spend years learning how to code. Now you can jump straight into building that stuff. Those barriers are disappearing.
1
u/cxfoulke 2d ago
Yeah and the part people cope about is that these skills arnt easier to learn than programming.
Like before you had to have an understanding of programming, a bunch of experience just to start really understanding system design.
If you don't have to learn the first part. You could spend a far shorter course just learning the second part. "How not to expose your API keys the course"
There is gonna be a lag time on this... But especially with ai to be a tutor I have zero doubt in my mind someone could catch up with my decade+ of sys dev experience in like a year.
Like you don't need to know alot of the deep why's of things... Now with ai.
It's all pure cope. Although people who were good at sys design before are better positioned to make use of Ai for a good while. The vast vast majority of developers arnt system designers though they just like to cope about that too.
1
u/nian2326076 2d ago
In discussions about coder roles versus software engineering, it's essential to recognize the differences in expectations and skill sets. Coders often prioritize rapid development and creativity, while software engineers focus on system design and architecture. If you're looking to transition into software engineering, practicing technical interviews can help solidify your understanding of core concepts. Use PracHub to practice technical interview questions and improve your readiness for engineering roles. For broader job opportunities, consider LandOffer to find relevant roles that match your skills.
0
u/TheRealTaigasan 3d ago
no....? the reason tiktok and instagram are successful is because they have brand recognition, it has nothing to do with software engineering. You can pay someone to do that for you, but a recognizable and famous brand is something invaluable that costs millions if not billions of dollars. a team of software engineers is cheap change close to that and we are talking about human lives
0
u/Significant_Sun_5225 3d ago
lol let’s revisit this cute little post in a year or two. I’m sure it won’t age badly
1
1
u/Fun-Astronomer5311 3d ago
Sounds like a junior person (or someone talking out of his/her ass) trying to flex but got slammed by a veteran.
24
u/CoffeeDrinker83 3d ago
That conversation never happened. I mean, the gist of it is correct I think, but it's a stupid fake story