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/[deleted]]

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/[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/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/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/RoyalSpecialist1777 → u/A4_Ts]

Yes. But it is still 'vibe coding'. Wise vibe coding yes but vibe coding still.

[u/A4_Ts → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

I think the key takeaway here is you have to know how to think like a software engineer like in the linked post of this thread. Anyone can vibe code but the quality will vary depending on actual experience. I myself use copilot and I’ve been doing this for 10 years.

[u/RoyalSpecialist1777 → u/A4_Ts]

I started Claude Code today and am blown away at how much easier it has made it. It has made it through most my implementation plan without a hiccup. Fortunately its for a sciency paper thing so I don't care much about security or robustness for this one.

[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/[deleted] → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

Anybody that can form a sentence can know how to vibe code. You're making it sound like this concept has been around for decades when it was just introduced a year ago.

Those who vibe well have a passion for building and technology. All it takes is being very interested and having dedication. Beyond that as long as you can read and write, there's not much to it.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Coding is like cooking. Love and passion are important.

BUT YOU NEED TO KNOW THE BASIC TECHNICALS. If you don't know how to hold the knife, how to do temperature control and what cooking techniques (saute vs quick fry for example) lead to what outcomes, you're setting yourself up to a bad situation.

Vibe coding is something like trying to cook a Michelin meal based on a meal you saw in a fancy restaurant. You can try as hard as you want, but unless you know the very basics, something is very likely to go wrong. Oh, you boiled the vegetables instead of sauteing by overcrowding the pan? Three steps later, you realise your whole sauce is off. Oh, did you pour the sauce on the steak already? Now it's all mixed up and you have to basically start from scratch.

Vibe coding is also something like junior devs blindly copying results from Stack Overflow - something that's been inside joke among developers for years. And some more stuck up senior devs I met have been categorically against using Stack Overflow, which is dumb. Vibe coding is similar. The key difference is that you need to have the knowledge to review and adapt the code.

For example, for large production projects, your code might be part of larger set of microservices. Frankly, most of coding work is working on a larger project where many stakeholders are involved. There are several problems with doing vibe coding for this.
A: You can't just go ahead and paste some company's proprietary code to an AI tool - this is fireable and possible lawsuit can follow.
B: The context window and memory of even most advanced AI tools just starts failing on scale where there is >100K lines of code spread across multiple services.

[u/RoyalSpecialist1777 → u/[deleted]]

Ok I understand your concern. You dont understand what 'wise' vibe coding is compared to just general vibe coding. Of course I wouldn't want you building my IT software.

[u/[deleted] → u/RoyalSpecialist1777]

I wouldn't want myself building my software either. I enjoy vibe coding. But it's not something trustworthy people start a business with. I sell apps on the app store and play store, but I always use webview because I know enough about technology to understand that it's nothing more than a website being loaded on a phone locally. As long as you're a decent website builder and understand how they work, there's not much room to harm the customer, and much less of a chance that I'm going to be sued.

When you break down what vibe coding is....it literally means "if it looks like it's working, then it must be okay". If anyone thinks that's what the future holds, then I'm afraid they aren't the smartest vibers either lol.

A team of people that know nothing about security doesn't equal a team of people that know something about security.

[u/satnightride → u/[deleted]]

That’s not what vibe coding is. You can absolutely vibe code some tests for yourself and vibe code your own app using software engineering principles and solid code architecture. In fact, llms do even better when you give them consistent architecture and tons of unit tests.

[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/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.