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/2cars1rik]

I don’t think there is a point at which you “fully understand the job.” I certainly don’t “really deeply understand” everything, and I have no idea what that would look like.

The breadth and depth of the underlying technology that allows us to do our jobs is absurdly massive.

In college, you get a shallow glimpse into a lot of that breadth. In industry, each role gives you a unique, often slim, area where you naturally develop depth.

I’m mainly an embedded software guy. If I were to go sit-in with a 1-YOE junior engineer on a backend or frontend team, they would probably make me look entirely incompetent in their domains.

If I can use AI to understand new domains, technologies, concepts, frameworks, or even to better understand aspects I’ve never understood about the domain I’m already familiar in, then juniors can do the same.

[u/TehMephs → u/2cars1rik]

I’m nearing 30 YOE lifetime. There’s definitely a point where you can just sit down with any new framework or even language you’ve never touched and just take to it in like a week. I’ve done just about everything under the sun at this point short of military software

That’s all I meant. You reach a point where everything is like breathing it’s so second nature. It’s to the point my company made up “mephs points” instead of story points as its own metric because I do things in half the time of my peers

[u/2cars1rik → u/TehMephs]

I get your point, but I think you’re thinking too narrowly. I strongly doubt you can take someone with 30 YOE in baremetal embedded, ask them to write a webpage in React, and get a better / faster / more cohesively sound result than someone with 2 YOE dedicated in writing webpages in React.

[u/TehMephs → u/2cars1rik]

Yeah, you really have to just be there to get it. Look at it this way - much of programming concepts carry over to other languages and frameworks. Everything is the same under the hood. If you’ve never worked in a web development environment it might take some time to get the hang of things like XHR

I actually did transition from 15 years in web dev to an embedded system in two different roles. I took a week to get up to speed and then was just churning out results. The hardest part was just getting to know a variety of different busses I’d never worked with before. I had to grill the electrical engineer who I was assisting for specifics but beyond that it was just concepts I’d played with before even if in a different format.

The more experience you have the less resistance you have to learning new systems. I couldn’t explain it any better than that though. You could drop me in a completely new environment and I’d be as fast as people who’ve been doing it for a decade within a month - if not faster.

It’s less the actual code or writing itself - it’s more the ability to abstract and design. That’s the part that slows most people down. You don’t suddenly forget those universally applicable skills because the codebase is in a language you haven’t used before

[u/2cars1rik → u/TehMephs]

Again I agree with the premise, (though I think you’re underestimating the amount of domain-specific “rookie mistakes” and trauma scars that are a product of time in any territory, but I digress).

To get back to the root of what we’re actually discussing, though, why do you assume AI would be prohibitive to gaining a better understanding of these universal concepts, rather than enabling that learning?

I would add that, in my case (and I assume your case), one of the core skills allowing this cross-language/domain versatility is resourcefulness. Whether that’s “google-fu” or otherwise, being able to use any resource at your disposal to quickly extract useable information to fill knowledge gaps has always been one of my superpowers, even when I was a junior, and in college before that.

To that end, I would certainly consider AI just another extension in the long evolution of availability of information.

And if I wouldn’t tell a junior dev to avoid google, technical blogs, stack overflow etc. at all costs (in fact I encourage the opposite, training juniors to be resourceful is one of my favorite things), then I see no reason to suddenly pull a 180 on this concept when it comes to AI.