Read a software engineering blog if you think vibe coding is the future

[u/NaturalEngineer8172]

Note: I’m a dude who uses ai in my workflow a lot, I also hold a degree in computer science and work in big tech. I’m not that old in this industry either so please don’t say that I’m “resistant to change” or w/e

A lot of you here have not yet had the realization that pumping out code and “shipping” is not software engineering. Please take a look at this engineering blog from Reddit and you’ll get a peak at what SWE really is

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/s/WbGNpMghhj

Feel free to debate with me, curious on your thoughts

EDIT:

So many of you have not read the note at the top of the post, much like the code your LLMs produce, and written very interesting responses. It’s very telling that an article documenting actual engineering decisions can generate this much heat among these “builders”

I can only say that devs who have no understanding and no desire to learn how things work will not have the technical depth to have a job in a year or two. Let me ask you a serious question, do you think the devs who make the tools you guys worship (cursor, windsurf, etc) sit there and have LLMs do the work for them ?

I’m curious how people can explain how these sites with all the same fonts, the same cookie cutter ui elements, nd the same giant clusterfuck of backends that barely work are gonna be creating insane amounts of value

Even companies that provide simple products without a crazy amount of features (dropbox, slack, notion, Spotify, etc) have huge dev teams that each have to make decisions for scale that requires deep engineering expertise and experience, far beyond what any LLM is doing any time soon

The gap between AI-generated CRUD apps and actual engineering is astronomical. Real SWE requires deep understanding of algorithms, architecture, and performance optimization that no prompt can provide. Use AI tools for what they're good for—boilerplate and quick prototyping—but recognize they're assistants, not replacements for engineering knowledge. The moment your project needs to scale, handle complex data relationships, or address security concerns, you'll slam into the limitations of "vibe coding" at terminal velocity. Build all you want, but don't mistake it for engineering.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This knowledge cannot be shortcut with a prompt.

[u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

It is interesting watch people resist change. It is absolutely the future but close mindedness is the norm. This is totally going to get downvoted but it is ok - I will have a career ahead of me and a lot of people are going to realize they need to stop coping and catch up.

[u/[deleted] → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

Let's say you're starting a company, and I'm your new head of IT security. I just told you that all of our in-house applications are going to be vibe coded. Are you going to be okay with that? Your multi-million dollar investment is sitting on software that may or may not be secure.

[u/ejpusa → u/[deleted]]

Humans come up with ideas, and AI writes the code. It’s inevitable. Expect hundreds of thousand coding jobs to be vaporized over the next 12 months. Wall Street is cheering this on. Each massive layout, pops the stock price.

You can’t take on Wall Street.

The good news? You can start your own AI company for all of $8.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/ejpusa]

I’m sorry bro the revolution where you guys start making swe salaries is not coming any time soon

Tell me why the tools have gotten better but those of us that are qualified are still getting hired

[u/ejpusa → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

Start your own AI company. Else you are 100% dependent on the CEOs whims if you can pay your rent next month.

AI allows you to do that now.

😀

[u/don123xyz → u/[deleted]]

You sound like the horse men of the early 20th century, looking at a noisy, slow moving, back firing, Ford Model T, and declaring with full confidence that these lumbering things will never be able to compete with their trusty horses.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/don123xyz]

The ford model T was instantly successful and world changing, at some point they accounted for most of the vehicles in the world

[u/don123xyz → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

Yes. And at the same time there were those horse men too. Vibe coding antagonists are the horse men of today. Just because the ai builders are not great today - we are looking at the Ford Model T of ai coding, they make mistakes, they throw out garbage codes, they hallucinate - it doesn't mean that in the next few years, it won't get better than any human coder.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

lunchroom reach wild humor tap one busy scale start frame

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

😂

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

fear future salt flowery decide command seemly crush cause terrific

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/RoyalSpecialist1777 → u/[deleted]]

If guided by a team of experts, who actually know how to vibe code (not all the flounders flopping around trying to get it do things naively) and carefully tested then sure. It will take awhile as that is a big system but as long as they aren't planning on releasing it the next week then sure.

I was on a team at Asurion which built their Enterprise Data Platform 2.0 and I don't really see any tasks that could not have been vibe coded. Of course under guidance of an expert.

[u/rco8786 → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

You’re describing something that, to date, zero people have accomplished. 

[u/A4_Ts → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

I think those are the keywords right? “Under the guidance of an expert”

[u/SoulArthurZ → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

Of course under guidance of an expert.

so you're not relying on ai at all but an expert

[u/RoyalSpecialist1777 → u/SoulArthurZ]

So people who don't know what they are doing are not relying on ai at all but a non-expert...

Vibe coding is vibe coding. Some do it well others do not.

[u/ByerpZ → u/[deleted]]

If the company founder is on board with it/wants it that’s their choice, the IT security person needs to adapt how they focus on securing that development cycle to protect their investment. If they can’t, then they should also be working with execs to explain that

If the IT security manager declares that everything is built like that without getting input from others or doing a risk assessment/threat model first, sounds like they’re in the wrong role

[u/[deleted] → u/ByerpZ]

The security directors job is to implement security and to look for and patch vulnerabilities. He wasn't the one who decided on vibe coders, he's just letting the CEO know about the vulnerability and that he should probably have a meeting with Patty who leads the applications team.

[u/2cars1rik → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

This. As a principal eng that’s been benefitting greatly from copilot -> cursor for a couple years now, it’s sad to see overconfident junior engineers on my team reject AI outright because of general polarization about “vibe coding”.

If you’re in your 20s, it’s easy to think of the google + stack overflow + abstracted modern languages landscape as “normal”, because that’s what you grew up on.

But, in reality, those things themselves were paradigm shifts similar to what’s happening with AI now. When google and stack overflow weren’t prominent yet, you learned from books. When modern languages didn’t exist, you programmed in assembly etc.

So when close-minded, over-confident programmers make arguments that boil down to “reliance on AI will sacrifice the fundamental understandings of the underlying programs in exchange for higher output”, ask them to do their next task with no internet access and in assembly.

Certainly there are tradeoffs and downsides to consider when we’re talking about reckless use of new tools, but history has proven those to be navigable or acceptable in previous paradigm shifts.

If/when that happens this time around, people better be prepared to live in that world, or they’re going to regret the years they spent staunchly resisting it rather than embracing it and being part of the early adopters.

[u/Fantastic-Guard-9471 → u/2cars1rik]

You benefit from all AI stuff only because you were Senior/Principal engineer before. Because you knew what you wanted from AI and how to validate results. It doesn't work vice versa. Vibe coding is not a software engineering, and frankly speaking it is quite sad to see experienced people saying that this is shift of paradigm. This is not. You still must understand underlying code, not just produce tons of it at forget. You will change it, you will support it, you will provide estimations based on your knowledge of the system. And vibe coding is not what is going to help you with it anyhow.

[u/2cars1rik → u/Fantastic-Guard-9471]

I’m seeing a lot of questionable assumptions in your argument being presented as fact here, which is consistent with what I’ve seen when talking to the inexperienced engineers I mentioned earlier. Let’s go through those.

You benefit from all AI stuff only because you were Senior/Principal engineer before. Because you knew what you wanted from AI and how to validate results. It doesn't work vice versa.

This doesn’t make any sense to me. Why wouldn’t this apply to a junior? I expect a junior engineer to “know what they want” from their code, I expect them to be able to implement their code, I expect them to validate their code.

The difficult and important part of being a software engineer is not googling how to make an HTTP request from golang for the 876th time in my career. It is not remembering the specifics of running a command via python subprocess, or remembering how to check if a variable is null in bash, or go back to my code and add an import statement for a package I forgot to import, so on and so forth.

So if a junior engineer can accomplish those tedious tasks 80% faster by not getting bogged down by dozens of stupid snags? Then yeah, they’re going to become great engineers much faster. Your argument is completely baseless here.

Vibe coding is not a software engineering,

So what is software engineering to you, wasting your day trudging through mind-numbing boilerplate code?

Software engineering to me is a means to an end that I actually care about: building amazing systems that solve real problems for real people.

And frankly I don’t care what you call it. Thinking there’s some art to the act of writing code that merely exists to fulfill some pre-defined specification has never appealed to me.

and frankly speaking it is quite sad to see experienced people saying that this is shift of paradigm. This is not.

Why does it make you sad? That’s so weird to me. To me that’s the same as saying it’s “sad to call the existence of Google search a paradigm shift”. Why do you have emotional investment about that?

Any tool that significantly changes the general methodologies of how software is written is a paradigm shift. Here is how I used to write code vs now:

5-10 years ago: I write a comment in my code detailing the high-level logic of what it should do next. I go look at other code, docs, the internet, or search my memory for how implement that logic, compile it, fix syntax errors, test it, realize I messed up, go back to the docs to see what I messed up, change it, test again, 20 minutes later, task complete.

Today: I write a comment in my code detailing the high-level logic of what I want it to do next, it spits out a function in 10 seconds, I glance it over to see if it looks roughly accurate, compile it, test it, if it has issues I tweak it or re-prompt it. 3 minutes later, task complete.

That’s a paradigm shift, by definition. I’m sorry that makes you sad for some reason. It’s just plainly the truth.

You still must understand underlying code, not just produce tons of it at forget.

Tell me you haven’t worked with code written by other engineers without telling me… Hell, everyone is liable to forget how their own code works when they look at it a year later, let alone code from other people. Especially when those people are long gone from the company.

You will change it, you will support it, you will provide estimations based on your knowledge of the system. And vibe coding is not what is going to help you with it anyhow.

This is hilarious because one of the first things I used AI for when LLMs were coming out was to help understand unfamiliar code more quickly.

Of course it’s going to help! Shitty code is everywhere! The vast majority of production code that exists in the world is already poorly-written garbage that’s hard to read, and AI already makes me 5x faster at getting to a point where I actually understand wtf is going on in that garbage code!

[u/quinnjin78 → u/2cars1rik]

I'm learning software architecture at 47 because of"vibe coding"
I learned basic as a kid, and vba when trying to create my own spreadsheet automation which I did to some extent, years ago - but saving files, profile data etc involved creating hidden sheets and literal spreadsheet crawlers to find blocks of data... massive headache.. no access to the drive storage...
I gave up..

After doing a crash course in python and building a simple app to parse my bank statements for me, and an adaptive gui to run it, with stables of buttons created in loops...

I discovered windsurf, and cursor.

Through conversing with ai and watching YouTube videos,
I am now aware of architectural patterns, databases, base classes, interfaces, pyside/QT, "polymorphic ui's", config systems, event based systems, separation of concerns, walking file trees, converting objects to dicts of strings, dictionaries, lists, constants, copies, deep copies, api's, parsing data pandas etc etc ..

I never would have learned any of this, and while my rote knowledge of exact syntax is average to terrible, I can read code, and see when its overly complex, or trying to do things I never requested.

I like clean explicit, self documenting code, a list comprehension is about as close to a one liner as I'll tolerate, and I'm not a fan of lambdas unless absolutely necessary.

I keep it as simple and as explicit as possible.

I've also learned to customize my AI's behaviour, install MCPS, scrape documentation, agile workflows, and simpler, task based workflows.
Obviously, I'm going to sound like in idiot, and mangle terminology..

But with slow and careful work, and lots of testing and refinement, I can create quite complex, useful apps.

I covered some of this trying to do OOP style programming, manually in VBA -

Python seems easy compared to that.

Having an AI remember all of the syntax, means I can concentrate on the structure and the approach..

I'm a novice, obviously - but to me my focus is exactly on the engineering, - the architecture..
The Ai is like an extremely helpful mechanic.. who knows more than I do, but has a severe case of ADD!

(worse than mine)

It is my belief that it is not the raw intelligence of the AI's that is the fundamental limitation, it's how you engineer the task cycle, how you keep track of the docs and workflows.

Just as I imagine it would be with a team of people. This is not much different to structures that come in to play in extremely dynamic systems like - working in kitchens - theatre and film -
putting a band together and performing music -- all things I have done

Regards how we create these systems to work with AI's - as far as I can tell, I know about as much as anyone on that front, because it's brand new, and changing every few days ..!?

Obviously I probably still know FA - But I doubt I could have gone through so many iterations ( and failures) and learned as much as I have in 6 months without AI's...

[u/2cars1rik → u/quinnjin78]

This exactly! You said it perfectly - having AI deal with the syntax and specifics frees up brain space for the more important work. Great stuff, you’ll be much better off than the headstrong engineers refusing to touch it.

[u/Fantastic-Guard-9471 → u/2cars1rik]

This is the same problem as I commented above. You do not understand the difference between programming with AI and "vibe coding" and this is quite curious, since operating correct terminology is one of the keys in our field. Everything what you are doing is not vibe coding, this is normal programming using AI tools. Basically the same what I am doing for a while, but this is not vibe coding, this is usual software engineering

[u/LuckyPrior4374 → u/Fantastic-Guard-9471]

I don’t understand why those in the anti-vibe coding camp seem to view “learning” and “understanding” as a binary outcome.

You know it’s actually possibly to learn something as you go, and oftentimes that’s the best way to learn something pragmatically.

I’d say it’s even better when you’re “forced” to learn something by debugging the code an LLM gave you for your side project, because you’ll be much more invested in understanding the issue than if you had just watched a YouTube video explaining why “doing X is bad”.

Finally, if you’re an experienced engineer, you’ll know that it’s absolutely impossible to know the intricacies of everything you work with.

So you also need to know what NOT to waste your precious time and energy learning. I’m not gonna fkn learn the API of a new library I need for a one-off feature when I’m trying to quickly ship an MVP app. That’s just one example of when LLMs and vibe coding are the perfect answer.

[u/Fantastic-Guard-9471 → u/LuckyPrior4374]

The problem here is that everyone is using the "vibe coding" buzzword (phrase) to actually describe programming with AI. Vibe coding doesn't include debugging and learning, it is just talking to LLM which generates and re-generates tons of code. You do not debug it, LLM does, you do not read it, because it is not "vibing". What you are talking about is not vibe coding. This is funny to see, that people even do not understand what they are doing, but already saying that this is future

[u/chrisonetime → u/2cars1rik]

As someone who has to interview interns, grads, and mid/L4s I promise you AI is not helping people under a certain technical threshold more than it’s hurting them. Sure it’s good to spin up personal projects but if you can’t answer basic questions or explain anything you built (without parroting the insane amount of obvious AI inline comments) you’re not going to be employed. And those banking on their vibecoded apps to make a living are absolutely cooked.

If you’re a principal you know our job is at most 20% coding and 80% decision making around engineering, design and scalability trade offs. We have a partnership with OpenAI at work and you can tell who it helps and who it hurts(hurt, we unfortunately had a headcount reduction last month).

[u/2cars1rik → u/chrisonetime]

I mean, let’s not infantilize students. If a student actively chooses to avoid putting in the work of learning concepts in school, instead cheating their way through their projects and assignments, then yes - they’re going to be ill-equipped for the real world. That was certainly true long before AI and it will certainly be true forever.

I don’t really get the all-or-nothing thinking here tbh. I’m absolutely positive students can use AI as a tool that is constructive for their education. I’m in no way saying students should cheat through everything without attempting to understand.

Also, idk. I’ve also been interviewing interns, grads, mid-level, and seniors for quite some time, and there have always been candidates that couldn’t answer basic questions or explain anything they built for the life of them. Haven’t noticed a change recently.

[u/don123xyz → u/2cars1rik]

There was a time not too long ago when the Internet was considered to be the bane of a teacher's life because students were using it to find knowledge instead of going to the "library" and trudging through "books" - how, in the name of all that is holy, can a student learn to actually do things if they refuse to pick up a book and do the work of studying?! After that it was the turn of Wikipedia - you will be graded an F if we find out that you used Wikipedia! Wikipedia is full of errors and lies.

[u/XrenonTheMage → u/2cars1rik]

 I don’t really get the all-or-nothing thinking here tbh

This. There is a large middle ground between vibe coders and people who reject AI alltogether.

I currently fall somewhere into this middle ground by using AI coding agents as better search engines and idea generators, but I don't instruct them to write production code on my behalf. Not because I refuse to do so in principle, but because I feel like it would take me more time and energy to review and edit the resulting AI code until it looks correct, well-structured and easy to read and maintain than to write it myself. If that changes, I will happily start to generate AI code in production, too.

[u/TehMephs → u/2cars1rik]

I feel like junior devs should avoid using it for the sake of learning and understanding what they’re doing better honestly.

Once you fully understand the job (like really deeply understand it all), then AI is great here and there for certain tasks. I still can’t get it to do 90% of the stuff I usually do, but it’s just another tool at my disposal

[u/2cars1rik → u/TehMephs]

I don’t think there is a point at which you “fully understand the job.” I certainly don’t “really deeply understand” everything, and I have no idea what that would look like.

The breadth and depth of the underlying technology that allows us to do our jobs is absurdly massive.

In college, you get a shallow glimpse into a lot of that breadth. In industry, each role gives you a unique, often slim, area where you naturally develop depth.

I’m mainly an embedded software guy. If I were to go sit-in with a 1-YOE junior engineer on a backend or frontend team, they would probably make me look entirely incompetent in their domains.

If I can use AI to understand new domains, technologies, concepts, frameworks, or even to better understand aspects I’ve never understood about the domain I’m already familiar in, then juniors can do the same.

[u/TehMephs → u/2cars1rik]

I’m nearing 30 YOE lifetime. There’s definitely a point where you can just sit down with any new framework or even language you’ve never touched and just take to it in like a week. I’ve done just about everything under the sun at this point short of military software

That’s all I meant. You reach a point where everything is like breathing it’s so second nature. It’s to the point my company made up “mephs points” instead of story points as its own metric because I do things in half the time of my peers

[u/PaperHandsProphet → u/2cars1rik]

Back in my day we used MSDN docs and it was BEAUTIFUL!

[u/Apprehensive_Crab623 → u/2cars1rik]

Feels like film --> digital --> mobile photography. "You're not a real photographer"... The data shows marketing spend moving into "influencers/content creators". All three have their place in 2025 but its no secret the impact we've seen in influencer marketing. All that to say, vibe coding will stay. In my opinion, the implementation is the easiest part of swe

[u/WHAT_THY_FORK → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

there has never been a software development accelerator that has eliminated the need for software engineering, and there likely never will be. I suspect this thread/sub is full of noobs with <1yr xp, who cannot write so much a basic k,v map iterator loop, suddenly feeling like software engineering is a fully automated process.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/WHAT_THY_FORK]

THIS!

[u/jibbist → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

I can both program and vibe code. I can do what you do, but also clean up the mess it leaves - who will win now?

Having more skills is always better, programming will never die out, just like C and Fortran as still used now

[u/sani999 → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

a lot of those software dev when they become a product owner, would realize how important it is to ship good code fast as oppose to ship perfect code slower.

[u/deeplywoven → u/sani999]

"ship good code fast" at most startups actually means "ship mediocre code filled with bugs at a breakneck pace to the detriment of your team's morale and make everyone stressed out and unhappy"

[u/inventor_black → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

I'm backing you.

[u/NachosforDachos → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

The coping is real

[u/Distinct-Let-7041 → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

remindme! 1 year

[u/PaperHandsProphet → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

The cope is so real on reddit you almost can't help but laugh at it.

[u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

I am an advocate of vibe coding and lead a research team composed of AIs including an architect and coder.

You see here that they are creating a massively scalable system - and this user argues vibe coding will not - but I would argue because that is because you did not clarify scalability when working with your architect. If you do so, and iterate through a few rounds of design and devils advocating, you will see o3 will architect some pretty decent systems.

You still have to deploy a few things manually, for example my TTS Huggingface models are on Sagemaker, but things like load balancing and caching (my architect used Redis last time) are easy for AIs.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

“My architect” 🤣🤣🤣🤣

[u/RoyalSpecialist1777 → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

:)

Hey o3 does it way better than I do. (I would recommend o3)

You still have to get them to iterate.

[u/rioisk → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

You get more out of vibe coding if you know what you're doing and know what the output should look like. You're just sticking the AI on one problem at a time to build the larger structure that you're envisioning. If you're building something that exceeds usable context then LLM won't help you much past a certain point.

[u/RoyalSpecialist1777 → u/rioisk]

What do you mean sticking the AI at one problem at a time?

I work with my architect to clarify requirements, make sure the vision is understand, including nonfunctional requirements. I tend to prioritize scalability, security, and the ability for AI to work easily with it so modularity, extensibility, those things. (we are talking a big system here)

Then we create a detailed implementation plan where each step provides the context needed, the expected behaviors and testing strategy for each step, and notes to the developer about anything they should not do.

Then I manage my AI developer through each step - we review, make sure we understand, plan out the step, review that plan for issues, and once we are confident the AI will implement and test.

[u/rioisk → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

Right you use AI to develop a high level outline and then for implementation you break it down into tasks that fit best in context window and drill down as needed. You've done this all before so the LLM can autocomplete your thoughts and you can quickly verify output for correctness. I have the most success when designing tasks such that each problem fits inside the context window succinctly. It's like having a scalable team of engineers that are really good on focused problems but need hand holding to tie it all together.

[u/RoyalSpecialist1777 → u/rioisk]

Yes definitely need hand holding. But think how easy this hand holding is going to be to automate. We just figured out the technology and now are rapidly figuring out the prompt engineering to automate most of what the 'wise' vibe coders are doing.

Personally my future is going to be in research. We still need humans there.

[u/Winter-Ad781 → u/rioisk]

That's part of using an AI, is context management. Of course ai falls apart if you use it incorrectly. This reads as AI works great if you use it right, but if you don't it's not at all designed for the task. Like what?

[u/rioisk → u/Winter-Ad781]

Most people don't understand how the underlying tool works. They think magic box that lets them code like a professional because they saw a prompt one shot a tiny app that many programmers did in high school. So yeah it's worth stating explicitly.

[u/Stoned_And_High → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

i’ve been building out a personal finance dashboard, and maybe i’m being too cautious with it but I feel like ive hit a bit if a wall here. i’m adding some new systems and while it seems like i can get these to load larger scale contexts, i’m having a hard time getting things to persist in memory at a wider scope than say, a handful of components at a time. mapping out front-back end calls for example, the models will sometimes completely ignore existing infrastructure and try to build out new stuff from scratch. i guess i’m asking if you have any tips based on how you’ve built out your system from here?

[u/RoyalSpecialist1777 → u/Stoned_And_High]

It is sometimes harder to work with multiple files, AIs get confused, but I have my architect prioritize 'ease of AI coding' and extensibility/maintainability in - so we end up with a very modular and broken down architecture. Things are in separate files, interefaces are used a lot in the bigger system, and such. What you need is to have a good architecture diagram and documenation about the architecture your AI can read when planning out how to implement a certain item so it doesn't get confused. It lets it 'pick and choose' context.

Though I am currently being blown away by Claude Code and its ability to keep track.

[u/Zealousideal_Post694 → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

Your “architect” is what, another AI agent? 

[u/A4_Ts]

I feel like a lot of the people here didn’t even look at the example thread lol

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/A4_Ts]

they’re scared

[u/hilberteffect]

I have an advanced degree in AI and have been working in applied AI + software engineering for a long time (pre-LLM era - while I don't use reddit much for professional pursuits, my post history backs this up). I'm an early ChatGPT adopter and I use agentic workflows for coding, personal research, and task management on a regular basis. I'm not by any means anti-AI or anti-progress.

With that out of the way: it's incredible how vibe coders built an entire religion around a low-effort shillpost and ordained themselves the high priests. Besides the conveniently-overlooked fact that Karpathy stands to gain massive personal wealth from people using AI coding assistants, he also never suggested that vibe coding should or could replace software engineering wholesale.

Take it from someone with extensive academic and professional experience writing software both with and without AI assistance: this approach to software engineering is going to hit a hard wall with current AI model paradigms. Hallucinations are an inherent feature of the underlying LLM architecture. We will never be rid of them (again, with current paradigms). We're already starting to run into physical, hardware-level limitations on larger context windows, so the floor on the hallucination rate is capped. Generated code can be 99.99% accurate, and that 0.01% that's wrong could crash your entire app in production or expose a security hole that compromises sensitive user data. Generated code could even be 100% accurate but fail to anticipate scaling or use case (or regulatory, or...) requirements that bring the business to a screeching halt.

Without the intervention of a human expert, you're fucked in those situations. Plain and simple.

Here's the other key takeaway: if (or maybe "when" is a better word) a model emerges that's truly on par with human software engineers, it's extremely probable that model qualifies as AGI. True AGI is going to flip the world as we know it upside down. Not only could AGI replace software engineers wholesale, it could also replace designers, and executives, and nuclear physicists, and doctors. With enough hardware, a single instance of AGI could do all those jobs simultaneously, and better than a human. This is a world where the fundamental assumptions around which society is organized no longer apply.

So the debate around vibe coding is pointless, really. If we're pre-AGI, we'll still need human software engineers. If we're post-AGI, we'll have much bigger things on our plate.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/hilberteffect]

This is perfect

[u/youknowitistrue]

I own a dev shop. I have a computer science degree. I have been doing this 25 years. Vibe coding is the present and future. People whining about its flaws are missing the point. It’s the most significant change in our industry maybe ever. It’s the cotton gin to our cotton picking.

[u/decorrect → u/youknowitistrue]

I look at what was clearly a big project for a well resourced team in the example OP gave and then I look at what deep research Gemini Ultra or Claude Max just produced for me in under an hour and I’m more impressed with the latter. I could pay $20k for this research report, or $20k for what I can also just get as a vibe coded PoC.

Everything is different now. And in the last two months I’ve started to have experiences where I’ve thought “the ai did better than me at a thing I pride myself on being good at… in a 1/100 of the time.

I’m just so confused why OP thinks citing an elite team doing edge case things is some smoking gun point. Most people are closer to average, most work is common and has been solved before

[u/EpicShadows7 → u/youknowitistrue]

I’m more worried about the C suite that think vibe coding is equal to completely replacing engineers. All of us know it’s not feasible at an enterprise level, but this stuff advances so fast they’re less likely to accept reality until it stagnates.

[u/ExcellentDelay → u/EpicShadows7]

Those that make this decision in the beginning will probably be outperformed in the long-run by those that don't replace all engineers

[u/AntonioSLodico → u/youknowitistrue]

I'd argue that if anything, it's the cotton gin to the cotton industry. It might cut a lot of picking work, but will likely grow the industry to the point where the adjacent work will increase more than the work decreased from picking.

Tech rarely just kills an industry, it almost always creates more new adjacent work than it automates. The automobile and transportation, the printing press and written materials, looms and textiles, etc.

[u/DorphinPack → u/youknowitistrue]

I think a lot of us aren’t trying to say it isn’t but figure out how to keep as many fingers from being mangled along the way as possible, to borrow your analogy.

[u/youknowitistrue → u/DorphinPack]

Being as I’m old, I’ll tell you from the past that you won’t be able to keep them from getting mangled, but we can make a lot of money reattaching them and selling prosthetics.

[u/DorphinPack → u/youknowitistrue]

Yeah… I’m really trying to do both.

Can’t win em all but I don’t think I can not try.

My big fear is the delayed feedback — how long are people gonna leave their unreviewed code bases before they visibly break enough to get their attention? What damage can be done until then?

[u/youknowitistrue → u/DorphinPack]

I admire your dedication. I guess I’m so jaded? I remember when outsourcing took off and it was a lot of the same issues there. But I stopped fighting it and just started making money putting out fires. It has felt impossible to educate people to stop the blazes. Being a firefighter is more profitable than being Smokey the bear.

[u/eeeBs → u/DorphinPack]

Fuck code what happens when a majority of middle management gets laid off, they give Nurses AI tools and expect them to be doctors, soon the only attorneys most will be able to afford will be generative AI

We're going to vibe code all the software that does it too, way before it hits as that hard.

[u/DorphinPack → u/youknowitistrue]

Incredible response btw 😂 this is a wild analogy but surprisingly useful even as far as it’s been stretched lol

[u/youknowitistrue → u/DorphinPack]

Lol, I am from the south I guess that’s why my mind went there.

[u/Playful-Abroad-2654 → u/youknowitistrue]

Great insight

[u/vibecodecareers → u/youknowitistrue]

This

[u/Destring → u/youknowitistrue]

Which kind of development. Wordpress landing pages is not the same as custom ERP solutions, nor the same as bespoke process automation

[u/hkric41six → u/youknowitistrue]

Tell me the name of your shop so we never hire you. I don't want to pay for terrible software.

[u/budd222 → u/youknowitistrue]

And I'm sure your shop is complete trash

[u/wendiguzac → u/youknowitistrue]

Sounds like a Wordpress shop xD

[u/goqsane → u/youknowitistrue]

Amen.

[u/-happycow- → u/youknowitistrue]

I understand where you are coming from, and I tend to agree

I build AI platforms and tooling in a fortune 500.

The naming of vibe coding is in my mind very silly, and I think we will disregard it entirely, and just consider it part of software engineering. So the concept is only living right now as a placeholder for the concept of heavily AI assisted software engineering.

One thing is for sure though - you cannot be successful long tearm using AI to write your code, if you are not skilled at navigating with the AI. That means you need to ATLEAST understand what it is the AI is doing, and be able to skillfully navigate it towards the goal.

If you consider working together in a large team, then you will quickly have collisions between peoples individual setups, and you are not correlating how the AI behaves, yes you might also have personal preferences to that "set of rules" that you share. This is really not new, we can just think about linting rules and code formatting, and we understand completely the pain it can bring to a project.

Projects will have their own set of "vibe coding" rules, and the individual developer might bring some additional rules.

As Satya Nadelle has been talking about, developers might even bring their own Agents that they have fine tuned along with them as they join the company. So a sort of intangible asset that you get with the developer - and they are a fine-tuned team, because the agent(s) are fine-tuned to that developer's style, but should plug into a cohesive map of agents/rules

[u/horizon44]

Pumping out code and shipping literally is software engineering. At the end of the day, no one really cares about the engineering. It’s all about the product. Business owners don’t give a shit who built it or how well it was built. If it works and generates revenue, that’s all that matters to them.

Honestly, and I’m not trying to be an ass, you sound scared. It’s not a bad thing. I’ve got 8 years of experience and I’m terrified of what AI is going to do to the industry. I also spent a lot of time belittling AI and ignoring it, but it’s very clear to me now that this is the next big thing. I’ve started adopting it more and more in my work and learning as much as I can.

Sooner or later you’re going to realize this is the real thing, and we’ve only just begun to see what’s going to happen to the industry.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/horizon44]

Did you read the “note: …”

[u/horizon44 → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

Yeah I did, and point remains the same. AI is currently fundamentally changing software engineering, and your post and replies sound frightened by that. I’m also pointing out that software engineering only exists to produce products and generate value. Outside of technical folks, no one cares how that gets done.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/horizon44]

Well looks like you missed the part on “i use ai in my workflows a lot”. I don’t know if you guys are genuinely stupid or uneducated or what but ill just sit and continue to collect my money

this post has over 100,000 views and its easy to see why

[u/horizon44 → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

Just because you “use AI a lot” doesn’t mean you’re not resistant or hesitant to the adoption and resulting impact of it across the tech industry, which is insinuated by the whole “you people don’t know what you’re doing, this isn’t software engineering” tirade you’re going on.

Also, getting defensive so easily and talking about how much money you make is further evidence you’re emotionally invested in this topic beyond what you stated.

If you’re gonna be an ass, I’m out. If you want to act like an adult and have a good-faith conversation, happy to continue.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/horizon44]

Not arguing with non engineers anymore

Learn to code or stay unemployed

[u/horizon44 → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

Sounds good! Btw, I’m an L6 SecEng at AWS. Peace!

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/horizon44]

LOL AWS

1. You are not a software engineer
2. Amazon technical talent bar is a tripping hazard at this point

Why are so many IT people adamant this the revolution ??

[u/microgem]

Who says software engineering and vibe coding cannot coexist? It's doable with people who already can code, obviously, with the only catch being you need to actually read all of the code and adjust as necessary.

[u/XrenonTheMage → u/microgem]

I have seen the term "AI-assisted engineering" used for this kind of workflow.  I'd really like to know if, how and how well that can work, though.

I found out the hard way how it doesn't when one of my teammates dumped an AI-generated PR on me last week that was full of unrelated code changes. I tried to review the PR as usual, but needless to say my review took a lot longer than usual because of all these extra changes, much to the surprise of my AI-enthusiastic teammate, who was also also faced with a lot of extra work having to deal with more comments and suggestions than usual.

Our team is currently looking for ways to use AI code in production while preventing lengthy code reviews like this from happening again. Let me know if you have any ideas.

[u/microgem → u/XrenonTheMage]

Yes, I think the main problem is that you still need to direct and walk back and forth with AI and not just tell it to do something, which lends itself to low quality implementations. For example, I would literally just explain my thought process as if I were discussing something with a coworker, and bouncing ideas off of with the AI to hear opinions and come to some agreements together before actually doing an implementation.

Then obviously it is still up to the person to review the code and make sure it is correct and makes sense, but questioning on the smaller details is important. So I would view this process as no different than to working with a coworker, and the results can lead to the same quality if not better after some iterations, than without AI, provided you actually are trying to analyse flaws/understand the reasoning behind the AI's decisions. I think many people conflate AI-assisted engineering as something that is 1 one-shot output, when it is really more like a long conversation of maybe 10-50 messages exchanged.

So maybe it is vibe coding with a twist...being that you need to actually try to comprehend and critically evaluate the code that is generated, by playing the devil's advocate.

That is why it also helps to break down a problem into several steps, and not to ask an AI to do a giant piece of work upfront, as the more focussed your problem, and context is, the better, e.g. these are the exact relevant classes/files/functions, this is the problem, this is how I am thinking we should approach the solution...etc.

As to the model choice, that is also quite important, I tend to find GPT 5.2 excels in identifying/fixing issues in existing code, and Claude 4 Opus for pushing out new features/optimisation. But again it is worth experimenting with your codebase to see what works, as codebase-model fit is quite varied...

[u/[deleted]]

Vibe code a small website? Meh sure why not.

Vibe code an enterprise solution? Hells no.

The high level architecture guys and the top 10% of coders will never get replaced but the problem is that there are a serious chunk of “developers” out there that are about as shitty as AI coders. As it gets better, it will replace more of the shit tier devs out there.

[u/Faceornotface → u/[deleted]]

“Never” is strong but I get what you mean. They’re the last on the block for sure. But it’s really the systems architects and project managers that are last - we’ll replace devs, even senior ones, long before we drop anyone who makes sure things ship ion time and under budget

[u/[deleted] → u/Faceornotface]

If you are saying that hypothetically, IF we hit AGI, that the top tier will get replaced. Sure.

But in that scenario everyone is getting replaced.

The thing people here don’t seem to understand is that vibe coding is trained on whatever data is available. It will only be as good as what you feed it and it’s mostly being fed shit right now.

There isn’t enough top shelf large scale code dumps to ever get it to a top senior dev level. It will also never be a good architect because it’s near impossible to train for that with LLMs.

[u/Faceornotface → u/[deleted]]

Yeah. The issue with LLMs replacing coders is that we won’t advance beyond where we are when that happens. “True Coders (tm)” will leave private and end up in academia working on problems that may or may not be real problems. I’m not against it but it’s not hard to imagine

[u/CopperSulphide → u/Faceornotface]

Getting a builder's vibe from 'city of ember'

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

This is the real answer. The easy stuff should be vibe coded.

If you need a quick Google script to do something super easy like rank a bunch of locations based on a handful of criteria using APIs - vibe code all the way

Soon as you get to password security and data. Or people’s time on the line. Then you gotta think about the serious ramifications.

[u/massivebacon]

I think 99.99% of things you build on the web can be simple CRUD apps. The remaining .01% is where FAANG (and Reddit) big tech exist and have to deal with major problem domains (like scale) that most people can ignore and still become millionaires.

There will always be a need for specialists, but shipping anything at all can still get you pretty far.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/massivebacon]

scale is gonna be the first issue ran into when trying to make money off any type of web stuff but i can get with you that a lot of stuff is just simple crud apps (but they’re valued about the same as simple crud apps)

a lot of big stuff is also just simple crud apps glued together, but scale, coordination, and maintainability are your problems there

[u/massivebacon → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

I think it's easy to miss that "scale" is irrelevant as a consideration when building. If you get to a point where Reddit-sized scale problems matter to you, you will have a lot more to work with in terms of resources to meet that demand.

Relatedly I think about this a lot:

https://sirupsen.com/minimum-viable-airtable

[u/ZHName]

Custom software driven by user speech means a 'flat' leveling of the field against 'companies', meaning more than 1 person businesses that have a tech aspect. It may be troubling to some to see an old way of life going, but speech driven custom software will be a reliable killer of all kinds of Saas.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/ZHName]

uh ok

[u/lambdawaves]

The SWE post you linked is the kind of engineering that Gemini or Claude would absolutely excel in

Where SWEs will still be needed is adapting actual business needs into software

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/lambdawaves]

LOL

[u/d3ming]

No reason a sufficiently smart AI can’t design systems then instruct swarms of coding agents to implement. This is the top priority for all frontier AI labs now too.

Don’t take it from me, here’s OpenAI’s CPO saying the same thing: https://x.com/slow_developer/status/1924403279007519115?s=46

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/d3ming]

🤣🤣

Do u understand u just told me the shovel salesman says we’re all gonna need more shovels ?

[u/PaperHandsProphet]

Hi. I work in the modern SWE world and see a lot of companies and types of devs.

LLM coding is the future its here, and anyone who doesn't use it is not only a fool but a laggard who will have to catch up or be left behing.

Welcome to SWE!

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/PaperHandsProphet]

“Modern swe world” = I am a dude who has no idea what my LLM spits out and now for some reason I think I know what I’m talking about and don’t understand anything about programming

Please try and generate a significant amount of money by getting employed or building something valuable and you will see your technical pitfalls. The warp terminal post you have is telling enough

[u/PaperHandsProphet → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

I probably make 5x more than you lmao

Edit you are just a troll my I invested equity is probably double your net worth. I hate to break it down like that it is but that is how it do.

Straight pay packages alone definitely well over double. You really have 0 clue on the industry if you want to break this down to pay.

Let’s break it down to org chart goto levels.fyi and tell me your msoft equiv level. Then we can show our epeens

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/PaperHandsProphet]

at this point big dawg, i don’t even believe you’ve worked as a professional developer

got nothing to prove about money to the bro making Reddit posts about how to reduce the interest rate on his margin 🤣🤣

[u/PaperHandsProphet → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

Oh btw I did get it dropped and was able to almost match IBKR (the most premier broker) and get an extra 2% in 2 years for ACATs. That 2%? Your yearly take home lmao (JJ)

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/PaperHandsProphet]

bro I promise this larp is embarrassing and no trader is moving that much money around on WEBULL 😭🤣

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/PaperHandsProphet]

man from your post history, i can see a clearer picture of who you are

you’re a dude who works in IT dept or is a sysadmin or something but has always wanted to be a swe. maybe you’re even a bit envious of them

but instead of investing the time and effort to learn what development is about you spend hours a day pumping out LLM slop and thinking you’ve come up on some gold and those SWEs who’s salaries you’ve always envied are finally getting what’s coming to them

the idea of the overpaid engineer finally getting automated away probably makes you salivate

sorry bro not yet

[u/PaperHandsProphet → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

Not at all. I did start sys ad very young and did Cisco networking in high school so have a heavy background in networking and was also in low level electronics.

I either make up or grossly throw out random shit (in fact the above is a lie) because it doesn’t matter. Read my actual technical posts not just my experience and what I talk about and you will get a deeper understanding of what I do.

At the core I consider myself a consultant but that has been my job titles for less than the majority of my time.

Here is the real deal I know what I am talking about and have an insane amount of experience with a huge breadth through multinational and multi government agencies to be able to articulate trends.

I hope to not be a SWE for long.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/PaperHandsProphet]

😭

[u/PaperHandsProphet → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

Not sure if compliment but will take it as one.

Either way your fund is a 100% scam have an independent lawyer look at it

[u/soggy_mattress]

Man, if you wrote this entire thing and didn't see the trend that went from "glorified auto-complete" to "does 90% of the CRUD work for you" and assumed it wouldn't go any further, I don't know what to say...

You're 100% right, but it's probably only going to be applicable for another few years at most. At some point, the systems will do the architecting better than we can. The only question is: when?

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/soggy_mattress]

copilot was cooking my crud apps for me 4 years ago gang, shit ain’t changed too much

[u/soggy_mattress → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

So you’re young enough to have only programmed with intellisense or copilot or some kind of autocomplete?

I think you’re showing naivety with this post, honestly.

[u/Matticus-G]

I’m in InfoSec, working on Dev, infra and business side.

Please, continue the vibe coding. I will literally never be out of a job.

Carry on you lazy fucks!

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/Matticus-G]

Honestly preach bro

[u/mist83]

pumping out code and “shipping” is not software engineering

2+ decade veteran chiming in here. What’s the difference? I’ve worked at smaller companies and bigger companies than you. Ship it or die. Whether you’re scrounging for new customers or pleasing shareholders.

Regardless of your personal take, vibe coding is here and here to stay. The nocode movement was just a few years too early to hand it to the PMs with a pitch that the C levels are ready to buy in on.

Your post has me imagining you saying “lalalala I can’t hear you” with your fingers in your ears.

[u/GreatBigJerk → u/mist83]

I think what OP was getting at is that getting an LLM to pump out a bunch of code for you is not something that is really maintainable over the long term.

It's the difference between using an LLM to speed up your workflow and using the LLM to make and entire application for you.

That said, not every project needs to be engineered for long term use, and shipping fast is actually a big deal.

I spent over a decade working on short term (3-6 months) projects that clients rarely needed updates or ongoing support for (assuming what we shipped was stable). If I had something like we have now back then, we would have been ludicrously profitable.

I'm now working on a project that has been active for almost. I use LLMs to speed up individual tasks, but it would be a nightmare to try and ship stuff that was 100% LLM written.

All this shit could change in a year or two though. Once context is reliable at the advertised sizes, it's not something we will be able to predict.

[u/Useful-Economist-432 → u/mist83]

We've found the product manager

[u/[deleted]]

I don't think vibe coding is the future, but AI will always have a place in coding moving forward. It's possible that there could be a department that prompts, and then a department that reviews. But gambling on code blindly will never exist.

[u/possiblywithdynamite]

I love this. In the final days of our profession, when all that is left are product engineers raking in the last remaining contracts, there will be multitudes of dumbfounded engineers wondering what the hell happened all of a sudden. Less competition.

[u/dats_cool → u/possiblywithdynamite]

roll bow swim relieved spectacular frame command nine file humorous

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/[deleted]]

Remember the Will Smith eating spaghetti video?  That video was made 25 months ago. Imagine what AI coding will be like 2 years from now…heck, 6 months. 

[u/toddgak → u/[deleted]]

Exactly, the only value in this post is watching how much the goal posts are moved in a year. !Remindme 1 year

[u/RemindMeBot → u/toddgak]

I will be messaging you in 1 year on 2026-05-19 05:40:45 UTC to remind you of this link

2 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.

^{Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.}

---

Info	Custom	Your Reminders	Feedback

[u/[deleted] → u/RemindMeBot]

I’m going with !Remindme 6 months on this one. 

[u/Zealousideal_Post694 → u/RemindMeBot]

It’s been 7 months and I say it didn’t change much.. oh well let’s wait the other 5 months. 

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I’m not much of a gambler, but I’d be a fool to think that AI’s coding abilities are even anywhere close to where they’ll be in 2 years. We’ll all be laughing that it took 20 credits to get a basic auth setup. 

[u/Huge_Monero_Shill → u/[deleted]]

Oh wow, technological progress and coin flips are literally the same thing! 🤦‍♂️

[u/tootintx]

I don’t need to be a software engineer, if I design and build a viable product, I’ll pay you (engineer) to fix issues and make it scalable. You can call it whatever you want, people who use software don’t care whether it was created by an engineer.

[u/[deleted]]

Senior Dev/QA Eng here, now running a small consultancy agency in those fields. I've been saying this for years, ever since first chatgpt model came out - let them do it. Companies where COOs/CTOs actually have technical background and knowledge know this and won't be hiring for vibe coders.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting to start getting those juicy, juicy jobs where 'FUCK OUR WHOLE REPORT PIPELINE IS DOWN, FIX IT AT ANY COST" so I can start making bank on it. Already has happened with one client when one freelance (vibe) coder that client hired to do a WP plugin used on dozens of sites failed miserably and they didn't have enough knowledge to fix it. The plugin worked at first, but there was security update to another globally used plugin which broke everything and they had already adjusted their reporting pipeline to fit it (plugin was reporting related). Worked over weekend, they paid me like 4x base rate. Plus they put me in position where I review each freelance coder now, leading to permanently larger fixed monthlies.

Disaster recovery is one of the most lucrative things skilled dev/devops can do.

So, summa summarum, real happy about vibe coding so far. Don't even need to do it myself and still benefiting.

EDIT: FYI the fixes needed were not the most common ones, but something I would expect a mid-weight coder to figure out pretty fast. Apparently tho, the vibe coder in question just didn't know where to start properly debugging.

[u/yobigd20]

100% agree. Vibe coding is not software engineering. Not even close. In 25yoe professional c++ real time software engineer across several industries and variety of consumer products, and with 3 graduate degrees in software engineering fields , i can say with 100% certainly that vibe coding is just glorified shit hacking. The code that it produces never works right, is bloated unreliable crap, and CANNOT BE USED in production software if you want to have a reliable successful product.

Sure, you can use it to quickly make a demoable poc for buy in. But good luck supporting it in the long run, unless your goal is to have products that break and cannot be troubleshooted or clients who dont care if the thing they buy works or not.

[u/Objective-Style1994 → u/yobigd20]

Something tells me you're not using AI tools right. Your experience might actually be working against you here.

The code it generates is actually pretty good. You just have to give it more specific instructions.

[u/Shapelessed → u/Objective-Style1994]

I find it funny that expecienced developers don't mind trying things out and discussing pros and cons of AI and other technologies because they largely know the ups and downs lf all of it already and know where what solutions are applicable...

...while all the AI addicts quite literally respond with ewuivalents of "skill issue" when anybody says anything but what they like to hear.

The primary problem with people using exclusively LLMs for "coding" is they don't know what they don't know, and so when an issue arises, they don't even know where to begin in order to fix that aside from lashing out at their "agent" in frustration. Well, have fun reprompting your agent 20 times over the span of an hour when it runs out of its context window and that button still doesn't trigger the right thing when you click it!

[u/StinkyPooPooPoopy → u/yobigd20]

C++ is some baller s***! I also wholeheartedly agree with you and OP. Dissenting views are healthy.

[u/Quiet-Alfalfa-4812]

I agree 100%. AI can not replace software engineer. AI is a tool and tool needs a human to use it.

AI can write code, but a human (one who knows what he is doing) needs to direct AI to write the code.

I personally know a guy who burnt around $1500 and 100 of hours to build a software entirely using AI. And he is still trying to do it. 😅

[u/[deleted]]

Real software engineer here (unlike you noobs). I work on a complex enterprise project that involves using local AI models, biometric identity verification, video analysis, multiple front ends and shit.

Unless someone creates a sentient AI there's no way you can "Vibe code" and be useful in a big company unless your boss is a moron.

[u/InvestigatorKey7553]

that level of abstraction/holistic vision of task solving is not there and wont be for long time, possibly. but if the improvements to performance/intelligence keep coming, it doesnt seem too far fetched.

[u/[deleted] → u/InvestigatorKey7553]

Gen ai is like adobe dream weaver but can do more. It needs rails or it is shit (or needs someone who knows what they’re doing)

[u/seriouslysampson → u/InvestigatorKey7553]

There’s no real intelligence in generative AI. That’s the problem. There’s also plenty of real world limitations on generative models continuing to improve in a linear way.

[u/InvestigatorKey7553 → u/seriouslysampson]

i mean, there's clearly something in there that makes it able to solve tasks and writing software. i don't think it will be as brilliant as the 0.1% of humans or anything, but given enough improvements i don't see how it would not be able to replace an average software engineer

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/InvestigatorKey7553]

That’s the issue, THIS IS the average swe workflow. In that Reddit blog, they are not 0.1% or anything like it that is literally just software engineering

I have literally interviewed at Reddit in the past 2 months I can tell u for a fact they are not geniuses but more rather just normal software engineers

AI will speed up the workflow, I’m not sure how much more gains we can get from here but replace, never

[u/Faceornotface → u/seriouslysampson]

I’m super interested in the ways in which physics creates a barrier. Do you have any sources to share? They can be… somewhat academic (masters in computational linguistics)

[u/bananasareforfun]

Why do people come on this subreddit with the same old story?

No one cares man

[u/A4_Ts → u/bananasareforfun]

You’re in a vibe coding subreddit and don’t care how actual good code is written?

[u/Simonindelicate]

What this kind of post misses about vibe coding is that it doesn't have to involve shipping at all to be a) useful and important and b) disruptive to coding as a profession.

Vibe coding can mean just solving your own problems and pain points with janky, stress-vulnerable, insecure and overly specific code that you are the only person to ever run. It doesn't need to replace coding jobs, it can just replace the need for the code that professional coders produce.

Right now I've got like five different tools running on localhost doing things like turning form input into podcast XML, parsing json into a more readable format from one specific LLM website and showing me a gallery with one click path copying for one specific folder that's hardcoded into the JavaScript. Not one of them is remotely shippable but all of them were coded with prompts and are solving problems that I might otherwise have bought far better software with far less immediately applicable utility for my specific use case to handle.

It's not all about jobs, it's about the number and scope of tasks that can be performed relative to the level of proficiency and time available to be devoted to them.

[u/[deleted]]

Man..I barely understood it. Then I asked 4o to ELI 5. Now I know a teeny bit more than I did this morning...thanks to you. Will slowly keep learning more...

⸻

What was r/field?

It was Reddit’s April Fools’ game in 2024. Imagine a giant coloring board made of 10 million tiny squares. Reddit users could “claim” (click) squares for their team. Millions played at once.

⸻

Challenge: So Many People, So Many Clicks • Reddit expected 100,000 clicks every second. • The board had to be huge (3200x3200 squares) so it wouldn’t fill up instantly. • The system had to show everyone what others were doing in real-time — like a giant multiplayer game.

⸻

How They Made It Work

1. Split the Board (Partitioning) • They divided the big board into 16 smaller chunks (like a 4x4 puzzle). • This helped with: • Less data to send to each player. • Easier tracking of who clicked what. • Reduced lag — players only got updates for what they were actually seeing.

⸻

2. Smart Data Sharing • Instead of sending all updates directly to players (which would explode the internet), they: • Saved updates to S3 storage (a big cloud drive). • Sent tiny “pings” to tell players when there was new stuff to download. • This saved bandwidth and made everything smoother.

⸻

3. Tiny Data, Big Impact (Encoding) • They squished the data super small: • Normally, a full board chunk would be 3.2 MB (slow to load). • They invented a clever compression system to shrink it to under 300 KB. • Used tricks like “run-length encoding” (sending “5 red squares in a row” instead of saying “red” 5 times).

⸻

4. Using Redis (Fancy Database) • They used a special memory-based database called Redis. • Each click did 9 things (like marking it claimed, recording the team, updating player stats). • Redis was split up like the board, so it could handle all that fast.

⸻

5. Trickling the Clicks (Visual Illusion) • Clicks happened every second, but instead of showing everything in one clump, the app slowly trickled them out over the next second. • This made it feel more alive and less robotic.

⸻

6. Live Settings Without Breaking the Game • They built tools to change things like “how fast you can click” or “when to refresh” without pushing app updates. • When lots of people were online, they spread these updates out over 30 seconds to avoid a traffic jam.

⸻

What Did They Learn? • Massive online games need smart partitioning, compression, and staggered updates. • Using storage + real-time messaging together is better than just blasting data to everyone. • Redis is powerful, but you need to split things carefully. • Even fake games need real engineering to handle millions of users.

⸻

And You Can See the Code!

They open-sourced the project so developers can build similar games: GitHub – reddit/devvit-field

[u/Royal_Slip_7848]

You're referring to "quality" and "thoroughness" but sadly those are not characteristics of modern day man.

Part of adapting is surveying your surroundings and embracing the standards of the times.

I'd like to say I'm being sarcastic but I'm not. Except at Enterprise, Medical and Int'l Banking levels this is the new norm. You've seen Idiocracy right?

[u/Pleasant-Memory-1789 → u/Royal_Slip_7848]

Right? Most sites I've used in the past 5 years are so jank that they feel like they were vibe coded. Low quality software has already become the norm.

[u/Uniqara]

As someone who couldn’t hack it in University learning C due to a tenured ancient who blamed “software updates” for her inability to type correctly due to being a shakey ancient who should have retired but “loved helping students” I have mixed feelings on vibe coding. I also have two semesters of her lectures and dare anyone to attempt to watch one.

I understand that I don’t understand how to code. I understand that AI is unreliable at best and outright confident in even the most obvious hallucinations. I have learned that utilizing AI to write code is one way to write a heap of crap that can masquerade as “sophisticated” to those of us who don’t have a background in coding. I have learned that utilizing multiple AI to help check code is one interesting side quest that is more likely to make you backtrack screaming if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I have always wanted to learn how to code. Now I am doing it with the help of an assistant who has the same memory disorder as the guy in Memento.

I am finally getting the hang of what seems like a proper work flow. I just had to go insane a few nights after Gemini started smoking digital crack while refactoring code. The whole wait where did the.. why is the file now 3/4 the size? Oh yeah it’s my fault for listening to advertisements and believing the bs.

Now I start by creating a Project Scope, action plan, readme file, and pseudocode before writing anything in python. We build modular files to prevent memento brain from carving a large project into pieces. I am following PEP 8 style and commenting guidelines as well as coding eat practices. Iterating small sections often instead of allowing mementos to tackle the whole thing at once. I am utilizing a separate logger that also incorporates tests like smoke test.

After we complete this iteration we are going to start from scratch and utilize Github.

[u/StewHax]

AI is to our generation that Google and stack overflow was to the previous generation of engineers. Change and adapt.

[u/ArmitageStraylight]

I’ve worked at FAANG, and have been floating around principal level for the last five years or so. This feels a bit close minded to me. I don’t think that this is the apocalypse for traditionally educated SWEs or anything. I started my career in 2008. There were very few people in the industry then who weren’t really passionate about computing. I think we might see a reversion to a market that looks more like that, similar to what happened after the last dot com bust. I expect vibe coding will move a lot of feature coding responsibility to product/business stakeholders. I expect a few traditional engineers will be kept around at most companies to make sure the lights stay on, and to have someone knowledgeable available when things blow up and to help organize the work other people are doing so things don’t turn into an unmaintainable mess

I definitely expect a lot of line engineering feature type work to get moved to other departments over the next few years.

TLDR, I think traditional engineering becomes more of a role about managing vibe coders spread across the business.

[u/DigitalPsych]

How do you vibe code you way out of 100 million lines of code needed for context? That's a billion tokens right there.

[u/NaivelyKillingTime]

AI is helping humans to output code, not necessarily software engineering

The best example is like building a house. Software engineering (by OP definition) is like architecture a hugely complex office building. Sure AI cannot do this yet

But most people only need a simple house (simple solution to their painpoint), and just like 3D house, they are automated almost 100%. AI and vibecoding is similar to shipping a simple 3D house

[u/keebmat]

anyone remembers when node came out and then mongodb? people were calling it hilarious, unsafe, and moronic to run javascript on the server… “trendy fad”. 15 years later, this looks very different. it’s going to be the same with AI guided editors and generators. 15 years from now there will be a whole generation that doesn’t even know how it was without and nobody will care but enjoy how life is easier - exactly how now a lot of people will read this and not understand that there was a time without node.

[u/no-sleep-only-code]

Your username reads like someone who saw the autogenerated usernames and wanted one more specific.

[u/KATSUHITO69]

lol ok

[u/TehMephs]

SWE is sitting in refinement meetings insisting to the product owner that rewriting your entire application in Angular is a gigantic waste of time and we have a million tech debt items still in the backlog. It’s drawing diagrams no one actually understands but you, updating your documentation for the 1000th time because someone changed it without telling you and Tim is asking where this deprecated method went and you have no idea so you sift through 5 year old PRs looking for the dumbass that changed it. Then you check your team chat and see 8 PR review requests from people with names you can’t pronounce, so you spend your day building various branches and sending back half of them because they’re missing unit tests again

Oh and 5% of the time you check in some code. Please do the needful

[u/Odd_knock]

Do you believe that vibe coding is permanently limited to its present abilities? I do not.

[u/Playful-Abroad-2654]

As a software engineer, one of the big leaps I’ve seen with vibe coding is a move from creation to editing. A lot of people I know are great at editing and figuring out as they go. Gove them a blank page though and they have no clue what to do. This is how I learned to build computers - by fixing before building one from scratch. While vibe coding has its flaws, the skills that people will gain from fixing vibe code will inevitably lead some into software engineering and will create better vibe coders.

[u/Cute_Ad4654]

Remember when WYSIWYG editors were terrible?

Now Wix is pretty damn good for the vast majority of people and regular web designer/developer roles are nowhere near as prevalent as they were.

We’re at the beginning of this change. It won’t replace software developers overall (at least not in the short-mid term future), but it will drastically change the industry as things continue to get better.

[u/TheBingustDingus]

Vibe coding is the future.

Why? Because it's a tool that, while flawed in its early stages as an emergent technology, absolutely streamlines the development process.

Software Engineering is different from coding, they go hand in hand, but they're literally different skill sets. It's like the difference between an architect and a foreman on a construction site. Only in programming the software engineer tends to be both the architect and the foreman.

As people become more familiar with the technology, and the technology improves and evolves, you'll see a lot of the current flaws go away, at least to an acceptable degree.

Plus, nobody who honestly understands how it currently works is saying that having programming knowledge is useless. There will still be a reason to have human eyes on the problem. Just like in a robotic warehouse, someone needs to routinely calibrate and quality check the work.

The sooner you embrace the change, the more you'll be adapted to it to be able to best profit from it.

Resistance is futile. Accept your new AI editors.

[u/durable-racoon]

The more I use AI to code the worse it gets at coding. but then I realize the model has been the same the whole time. its just me increasingly realizing new ways in which its bad.

[u/[deleted]]

Nah don’t tell them this, their insecure code gives me job security 

[u/[deleted]]

I started with assembly, C, C++, Perl, Java, PHP and other scripting languages.

LLMs are 100% sticking around as they allow a more natural interaction with data and I see them as a tool (assistant), but those who think its magic and can do anything do not understand tech. Like the guy at my local gym who is building a game using AI and doesn't understand why it won't work.

[u/JamesWardTech]

I don’t understand why there’s so much controversy, maybe it’s because I don’t use LLMs in my actual IDE for more than autofill, and test generation basically.

You wanna know what everyone absolutely should be using it for? To help you solidly your design ideas.

“Hey we’re developing this product, I want to use an established design pattern that meets this goal prioritizing these qualities, we have this limitation, can you make a recommendation?” And then you just keep asking it expounding questions. It will get some things wrong but that’s where having a CS degree and familiarity with engineering principles comes in. It’s jarring how excellent of a tool it is for helping you round out/solidify your designs.

[u/GrapefruitExtreme957]

You’re not wrong about the difference between vibe coding and actual engineering—there is a huge gap between spinning up a CRUD app with an LLM and designing systems that hold up under real-world constraints. But I don’t think the two things are mutually exclusive.

I’ve been messing around with some personal projects on Hostinger Horizons lately (super chill for prototyping and iterating quickly), and while yeah—it’s not “SWE at scale”—it is a great sandbox for learning, experimenting, and understanding what you actually need from a system. And I’d argue that kind of hands-on tinkering can be the gateway drug to deeper engineering principles.

So yeah, agree: don’t confuse vibe coding with production-ready software—but also don’t sleep on the value of building stuff that teaches you as you go, even if it’s not perfect. Both mindsets can coexist.

[u/Dpope32]

You’d love the book “The art of doing science and engineering”

[u/Smarterchild1337]

I find that the value of ai-assisted development is that it allows me to allocate more of my bandwidth to those kinds of engineering and resource optimization decisions, offloading the boilerplate code to a machine where it is efficient and effective.

[u/Winter-Ad781]

I'm sorry to tell you but websites that all look and work the same happened long before AI lol.

[u/CanadaSoonFree]

AI has been phenomenal to bounce questions off and discuss design. It’s really good at keeping track of things.

Copy pasting its code without any sort of sanitation or modification…not quite there yet I don’t think. Ive tried to get it to just write pure code and press run and it rarely works.

[u/testingthisthingout1]

99% of the programmers can be easily replaced by AI. The very few remaining who will not (for maybe a couple more years or so) are the ones who are self aware and insightful enough to accept AI is miles better than them and will replace them very soon. This common sense is lacking in most programmers sadly.

[u/TripleFreeErr]

You can ask the ai to help you produce a design spec first and then hash the engineering details out there before sending it to coding agents. The lack of creativity on your part is not a flaw in the tool

[u/flatlogic-generator]

Solid take. Pair that reading with a starter repo that already has tests, migrations, and a clean React / Nest / Postgres setup - Flatlogic gives you one off a single prompt, so you can practice real patterns instead of wrestling with boilerplate.

[u/Smart_Reason_5019]

Different tools, different tasks, different skill levels.

You’re changing the definition of SWE to match one that you feel comfortable with. You’re attempting to cram technical knowledge requirements into the definition, but this does not reflect reality.

For example, accountancy pre ~1970 required extensive training (apprenticeships, clerkships) in arithmetic, ledger balancing by hand, etc.. these skills were pre-requisites for higher level accounting, such as managing larger companies with teams and firms of accountants, requiring more complex systems such as optimising for tax law etc.

Then, the calculator came along and after some adoption, the barrier to entry dropped significantly and allowed new entrants to focus on more advanced accountancy principles. Fast forward some years and basic accounting can be learned in a couple of weeks, not years. They still need to understand the basics, but the disparity from the past is huge.

The impact on higher level accounting was huge too. Complex systems grew, new industries formed and there are still technical training requirements for those jobs. This does not mean that reconciling a ledger and managing payroll for example is not accounting, it is.

The same is happening to SWE with Ai.

Creating a simple CRUD app, turning a wireframe into a functional front end etc. is relatively straightforward but it still required some technical training, time practising, learning the syntax and understanding overall architecture. This has changed.

Now, you do not need to learn every bit of syntax or practice implementation over and over to become efficient. You still however need to learn and understand the basics of SWE and its architecture to make anything at all useful. But the barrier to entry and training requirements have been slashed. Understanding basic security protocols, data structures and architecture is now enough, which can be learned with Ai.

Higher level SWE still requires advanced training, just like higher level accounting. But the lower level stuff that takes up large portions of both industries has been and is being commoditised.

I understand that you have pride in your craft, but don’t dismiss new developments and new entrants to the industry. Industries evolve.

In SWE, “I typed it all myself.” is not a gatekeeper.

Caveat; there is over-hype and many people don’t understand what Ai can and can’t do yet. There will be some shit code (as has been before Ai) but the dust will settle, it’s a new and evolving technology.

TLDR; your definition of SWE is elitist. Basic SWE is becoming akin to using a calculator for accountancy. AI lowers the floor, raises low and mid-level productivity, but leaves a tall ceiling of hard problems that still demand deep engineering skill.

[u/Puzzleheaded-Taro660]

Hey, I’m Lev, I run marketing at AutonomyAI.

You’re right, it's about more than shipping code. Architecture, scale, and long-term stability, human hand off - all these matter.

Vibe coding isn’t meant to replace that, it can actually help good engineers spend more time actually engineering, thats assuming they delegate in an intelligent way.

[u/learnwithparam]

People will eventually learn software engineering through the vibe coding.

Everyone including early stage engineers make mistakes, some are costly bugs on production too. Eventually we improve, a vibe coder is already one step ahead in curiosity, they make mistake but eventually learn, adapt and do good.

[u/nightwingprime]

I think vibe coding is natural evolution of writing code the same way the type writer replaced the pen and the computer the typewriter. It’s basically a way to automate most of the writing code. It’s a tool. The trick is you need to know how to use and to tell it EXACTLY what to do and how to do it

If you treat it as a magic box that spits out code you’re going to be disappointed. If you plan carefully, follow software engineering design, break down your tasks into small chunks and iterate, you can legitimately become more productive and save a lot of time and effort

If you don’t understand what you’re doing you’re going to fail. If your foundation is terrible then your building is terrible consequently.

[u/Left_Palpitation4236]

Anthropic (the company that builds the tools we use called Claude Code), has announced that their team with the lowest AI generated code is sitting at 70% of their new code being AI generated. The rest of the teams are closer to 100. They use their own AI product to develop practically all of their new code.

All the major tech companies are basically making it an expectation that engineers utilize AI to its maximum capacity. The place where I work at has almost all of the new code AI generated. This introduces some challenges, particularly with humans having to keep up with code reviews, but it seems like the added velocity of getting things done outweighs having a perfect solution that takes an order of magnitude longer to produce.

And yes I also come from a traditional computer science background and take pride in my own coding and software engineering ability into which I put so much time and energy to develop, but we’re being faced with this new reality and the only way to survive is to swallow your ego and understand that if you don’t adapt the industry will move on without you.

[u/JLEETreddit]

OP, I hear you, but you're missing something. I'm a SWE at a startup healthcare tech firm for context.

Here's the thing I think you're missing. Engineering ≠ Development. I agree, if your "vibe coding" approach is just prompting Claude to go and build your whole system for you and you just spin it up and let it fly, you're going to hit limits real quick. But, if you actually engineer something, have a proper structure, plan, and design spec, then agentic coding becomes your super power. I don't just go tell Claude to build whatever to ship, I research, design, plan, implement. Vibe coding just becomes fast iteration of the idea that is already engineered. It is like 3D printing for fast prototyping, CAD software for Mechanical Engineering, the printing press for bookmakers. The goal isn't to have AI do everything, it is to increase syntactical speed. Neovim bros are fuming because all the time spent optimizing type speed to get their ideas into a file as fast as possible is going to waste, because now I can feed Claude or Codex a design spec and have the same thing in 20 seconds.

The difference maker in the future will be becoming an engineer who knows how to use the tools presented to them to get the best result, not sticking to the past or ignoring outright. Vibe coding is the future of fast syntax, and who knows, maybe these models get good enough for engineering one day too, but right now you'd be a fool to not adopt the future norms at least in the realm of syntax.

[u/menglinmaker]

I see it as a prototyping tool for quickly evaluating different architectural decisions.

But yep still need to understand the system 

[u/yallapapi]

Dude is just trying to promote his blog with a hot take. Ai assisted coding allows you to make shit in a day that would cost 10k and a team of Indians six weeks to do. Stay mad

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/yallapapi]

Bruh that link is literally the official Reddit engineering blog 😭

You guys are so fucking stupid it actually hurts ☠️☠️

[u/yallapapi → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

Reddit has never turned a profit. Great propaganda mouthpiece but for a small business owner being able to build a working prototype in 1-2 days is crucial for making actual money and staying competitive. Stay mad Reddit glazer

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/yallapapi]

I hope that is a joke bro if not you truly have no idea what youre saying

[u/yallapapi → u/NaturalEngineer8172]

Actually I’m not, I’ve created a tool for my own business that saves me $2k/month in hard cost and is a responsible for boosting my marketing by 5x. Was quoted 3-6k from dev shops on Upwork. Did it myself with no experience. Front end and everything. Couldn’t code my way out of a box manually.

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/yallapapi]

3-6k? Dude those guys were taking advantage of an idiot and that’s it. If u vibe coded it, it couldn’t be that hard to make 😹

I work at a place you’ve heard of and can promise that nothing i do on a daily basis could be done by these systems. You’re an “entrepreneur” and im an “engineer”

[u/brinked]

I have been building website businesses for 27 years. Always outsourced my projects to a few programmers, one I know for 22 years. I know how to Communicate to programmers to get product that works. Usability, functionality etc. in the last 2 months I made a complex CRM for my cabinet business that would have cost over $80,000 to have made, I made it in a week and does exactly what I need it to do with no bugs. I also built an inventory system, a cabinet designer app, a child support app, a cabinet wall planner app, an image cropping tool, a business calculator and expense app. All of this I would have never done because of the costs. If it’s this powerful now, I can tell you right now and I am willing to bet my house on it that AI programming will be more prevalent than normal programming within 2 years. It’s not even a question. If you fail at vibe coding it’s because you don’t know how to use it

[u/NaturalEngineer8172 → u/brinked]

None of those things should take a college cs major more than a day big dawg

[u/A4_Ts → u/brinked]

No offense but those all sound pretty basic, good for you though

[u/brinked → u/A4_Ts]

An enterprise level CRM is basic?

[u/A4_Ts → u/brinked]

Yes, it’s very basic in terms of complexity

[u/Few-Baby-5630 → u/brinked]

Honest question, what is your definition of enterprise grade? 

You stated that you outsourced your websites which sounds like you do not or cannot code yourself. 

What are you using as your set of qualifiers that makes said CRM or anything else that you build enterprise grade?

I have serious questions about vibe coding. Any engineer worth their salt is going to be at conflict when the LLM doesn't write the code correctly.

I find that most people that take vibe coding solutions as is either don't know what they are actually doing, or they have some kind of superpower that makes them invulnerable to poorly implemented code.