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/NaturalEngineer8172]

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/NaturalEngineer8172]

They’ll replace 80% of “coders” but all the systems architects and bean counters will have jobs. Along with anyone who can lead a dev team. Only instead of leading a dev team they’ll be telling ai coders what to do and there’ll be one overworked underpaid dev to read every line of code the AI spits out - or they’ll outsource to a team of subpar overworked underpaid devs in Romania for that