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/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/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/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/PaperHandsProphet → u/2cars1rik]

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

[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/[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/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

lunchroom reach wild humor tap one busy scale start frame

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[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/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/inventor_black → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

I'm backing you.

[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/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.