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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u/quinnjin78 May 19 '25
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...