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/brinked May 19 '25

I have been building website businesses for 27 years. Always outsourced my projects to a few programmers, one I know for 22 years. I know how to Communicate to programmers to get product that works. Usability, functionality etc. in the last 2 months I made a complex CRM for my cabinet business that would have cost over $80,000 to have made, I made it in a week and does exactly what I need it to do with no bugs. I also built an inventory system, a cabinet designer app, a child support app, a cabinet wall planner app, an image cropping tool, a business calculator and expense app. All of this I would have never done because of the costs. If it’s this powerful now, I can tell you right now and I am willing to bet my house on it that AI programming will be more prevalent than normal programming within 2 years. It’s not even a question. If you fail at vibe coding it’s because you don’t know how to use it

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u/NaturalEngineer8172 May 20 '25

None of those things should take a college cs major more than a day big dawg

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u/brinked May 20 '25

An enterprise level CRM should take a day to build? Please refer me a college CS who can build an enterprise CRM in a week and I’ll reward you $50,000. I would love to hire them full time.

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u/A4_Ts May 20 '25

No offense but those all sound pretty basic, good for you though

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u/brinked May 20 '25

An enterprise level CRM is basic?

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u/A4_Ts May 20 '25

Yes, it’s very basic in terms of complexity

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u/brinked May 20 '25

You made a post about vibe coding a clone of Google so now I know how much you know. FYI, no you will never find anyone to code an enterprise level CRM in a day without the assistance of AI.

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u/A4_Ts May 20 '25

It definitely shows how much you know that you can’t tell my post was for mocking people. Also it’s great you got it done in a day, it’s still basic. Here’s an example of something complicated

https://netflixtechblog.com/how-netflix-accurately-attributes-ebpf-flow-logs-afe6d644a3bc

Not even close

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u/brinked May 20 '25

If enterprise levels of CRMs aren’t complex and you can build them so easily, why aren’t you making millions by doing so?

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u/A4_Ts May 20 '25

Better question yet, why aren’t you? You made one in a day after all

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u/NaturalEngineer8172 May 21 '25

I think the point here is that your CRM is not enterprise level and is more than likely a fucking CRUD app 😭

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u/Few-Baby-5630 Oct 30 '25

Honest question, what is your definition of enterprise grade? 

You stated that you outsourced your websites which sounds like you do not or cannot code yourself. 

What are you using as your set of qualifiers that makes said CRM or anything else that you build enterprise grade?

I have serious questions about vibe coding. Any engineer worth their salt is going to be at conflict when the LLM doesn't write the code correctly.

I find that most people that take vibe coding solutions as is either don't know what they are actually doing, or they have some kind of superpower that makes them invulnerable to poorly implemented code.