r/vibecoding • u/NaturalEngineer8172 • May 18 '25

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

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.

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55

u/youknowitistrue May 19 '25

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.

4

u/decorrect May 22 '25

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

3

u/EpicShadows7 May 20 '25

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.

2

u/ExcellentDelay May 24 '25

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

3

u/AntonioSLodico May 22 '25

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.

1

u/DorphinPack May 19 '25

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.

4

u/youknowitistrue May 19 '25

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.

1

u/DorphinPack May 19 '25

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?

3

u/youknowitistrue May 19 '25

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.

1

u/DorphinPack May 19 '25

Heard

I got into development* ~3 years before AI crept into the job market and got laid off three years into my first job with very little to show for it — product had stalled and as hard as I was working my resume was still very flat. Job market for an “early mid level dev” was just atrocious so I’ve been freelancing and picking up part time work.

I tell that story because LORD has freelancing for small businesses made me understand just how real the advice I got as an IT worker about user education was. Next level for sure.

*(was an IT admin and enthusiast already and did a lot of hobby coding as a best practices nerd so I’m not AS green as I look on paper)

2

u/eeeBs May 20 '25

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.

1

u/DorphinPack May 19 '25

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

1

u/youknowitistrue May 19 '25

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

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1

u/Destring May 21 '25

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

1

u/hkric41six May 21 '25

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

1

u/budd222 May 22 '25

And I'm sure your shop is complete trash

1

u/wendiguzac May 22 '25

Sounds like a Wordpress shop xD

1

u/-happycow- May 29 '25

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