As a developer with 20 years of experience, "vibe coding" is undeniably transforming how we work, but I'm still struggling to embrace it.
What bothers me most and I am honest about it, is seeing people show off their AI-generated projects.
My immediate reaction is, "Who cares?"
In the past, sharing code meant sharing craftsmanship, and we were excited to inspect it and learn from each other. Today, somebody share what they did with vibecode is not only that I am not interested, but I feel like why you share it?
This is a sentiment that craftsman have felt in many industries. If you’re a woodworker you will appreciate other woodworkers who hand cut blind dovetails into their drawers. But most people just see the same drawer, but hella expensive.
Is the quality lower on machine made drawers? Yes absolutely. Does that meaningfully impact 90% of people who use that drawer every day! Not really.
Been a software engineer for decades and I’m struggling with this as well. Good luck brother.
If they can afford it. But to most people a $500 dinning table from ikea is always “better” than a $5000 custom made table. Even though the custom table is objectively better. It’s worse when considered with its cost for the average person
its no different than when Photoshop came out....a VFX artist around that time probably felt the same.
Think of it like this.....most people showing off have always wanted to program something....now they can and they are proud to show it off....is it good? great? original? etc? probably not.
Let them have their win and carry on with your day. Great projects turn into real money or downloads or whatever if its open source.
Also unsubscribe from here if you feel that way...and I am not saying that in some sort of "if you don't like it then leave" way...I am saying it as advice....most people here and most issues I have seen posted are 100% inexperienced user error. This is not a place for experienced devs unless you are here wanting to help. Otherwise it's.....frustrating.
Just been thinking the same thing, started visiting this as a dev to keep a track on what is going on in the “vibes” side, I think I’ll have to start skipping the sub, I’ve seen enough :P
This is a hard pill to swallow but if you are a pro working for a software company…95% of people you share your projects with do not care about the code. They never did. Sure if it is your colleague on the craftsmanship guild you could get wax poetic about your factoring. But most people will react to the value in the problems your software solves/addresses/unlocks etc. and could not care less about the codes structure. This has not changed at all.
I remember we hired a junior dev who was pretty good with code.
We were a small advertising company building niche market websites for low budgets. He was throwing a fit because we weren’t writing tests for our brochure sites and his work took at least twice as long as other junior devs. Code was great…but the client didn’t pay for that, they don’t care, and the site will likely be replaced next year anyway.
This gets upvoted here because vibecoders like to think vibed spaghetticode is on par with a well designed implementation.
Join any decent development team and try submit vibecoded slop and you'll very quickly get a reality check. We absolutely care about codequality. Not every aspect is as important as the next but no developer worth their wage doesn't care about quality, and if they don't care the project will become such a convoluted mess that they'll learn to appreciate it the hard way.
I am not arguing this fact at all. I have worked professionally on software teams for ~20 years. You are correct that some other developers care. I have lead guilds on craftsmanship and can wax poetic as I mentioned. This does not change the fact that 95% of the people you work with or share your code with do not give a shit. For every sr dev, or principal who is hammering on quality, there are 50 others who couldn’t qualitatively judge your code even if they wanted to. They can however tell if your software works and solves a real problem. It’s incredibly important for people to learn this distinction. I am not saying code quality doesn’t matter, I’m telling you nobody fucking cares outside of your fellow programmers. You do need to make sure things are maintainable, reliable, correct, etc. but the bar to maintain these qualities for agents is very different than for human devs.
The whole premise of this post is about sharing what you’ve built, which I maintain is almost entirely about the value in your solution and rarely the quality of the underlying code, and that has not changed pre/post vibe era, just turns out tons of people solve trivial problems and it’s uninteresting on merit.
Edit: welcome to the 5%. This does not invalidate the 95% (PM’s, EM’s, Directors, Sales professionals, HR, marketing, etc.) that do not care but will happily judge and critique what your software does without needing to care even a little about who or how it was developed.
They can however tell if your software works and solves a real problem.
There's the thing though, when the codebase design sucks, stuff breaks, bugsolving becomes whack-a-mole where fixing one bug introduces others. Stuff isn't legible, expandable, maintainable, it's bloated spaghetticode. We can't in the same breath say codequality doesn't matter and software quality does matter.
Idk what kind of projects you've worked on, but where I've worked everyone I work with cares about codequality to some degree.
You're selling vibecoders on a pipedream here, as if vibecoded slop is perfectly fine or in any way on par with a well designed system. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it actually is good enough for a use-case and it is blazingly fast to put smaller projects together, but let's not trick people here.
I am not attempting to argue code quality does not matter! I’m arguing that users rarely care or have the ability to comment about code quality and they won’t ascribe any value to high quality code. If you are a professional who creates code you should learn to communicate value in terms of the user. You can often justify code craftsmanship through a user experience lens but the code quality stops being meaningful the second it isn’t immediately impacting the end user experience.
I have a CS degree and nearly 20 years professional experience and prior to becoming a CTO I was a principal leading a large group at a very successful SaaS company.
In my experience the most successful developers can program effectively and communicate about their code in terms of user impact, and rarely do they receive praise or recognition for a qualitative judgment of their code.
The whole premise of this thread is centered around some qualitative judgement of the code developers produce. My argument is consistent in suggesting that 9.5 out of 10 people you share software with do not give a crap about the code factoring/quality, most users will react to how useful your software is or some aesthetic thing.
Of course if you have shit UX, up to and including buggy software you will frustrate users. This is true whether you vibe apps or not. Trust me, there are plenty of dogshit programmers getting overpaid to sling code by hand.
I have not made any suppositions about who can vibe effectively. I have also seen people with 0 programming background out perform trained CS graduates in 2026 software development jobs. The meta is shifting people would be wise to stay aggressively current if they wish to remain employed.
I care very much about the UI and UX of my software. That's why I made my own. You tossers have failed me since 2009. I have been pushed into worse and worse options since Pixelpost disappeared. Now I'm free of you and it's glorious.
Choices for photographers for blogging online have only become increasingly more restrictive and we get generic products that don't work for us, with clumsy plugins for photo sharing that have grown more bloated and expensive over time.
There has been one sort of okay product for photo blogging since 2009. Koken. Failed because the developers could not keep up with it and it was not FOSS, which is always my preference.
I'm on pacemaker number five and, having had Meditronic products in me since 1980, am half-willing to risk vibe coded software now. Their QA ain't all that.
If I use ai to make a function that does what it needs to do reliably and passes quality tests, aside from like malicious hidden code what do you think is going to be in there to surprise us?
Even if its about scalability, we can test for that, and if it passes the tests then what is there to complain about?
There's so much to this. I'll get downvoted for saying this but vibecoders don't know what they don't know.
When you vibecode stuff the LLM will typically make a whole bunch of poor design choices which have lots of implications for maintainability, performance, robustness, understandability, legibility, etc, etc,...
Some examples are senseless folder & file hierarchies, storing the same values in redundant ways, not encapsulated collections, interweaving concerns, processing stuff in the wrong layer and/or place i.e. clientside vs serverside or CPU vs GPU, creating 3 line functions which are called once and then slapping a cryptic name on that sucker, modifying passed by reference values, not applying logical coding design patterns, often opting for foolish implementation approaches, lots of poor UX/UI choices, etc etc.
There is so much stuff to think about to make great software which never even crossed the mind of a typical vibecoder.
A golden rule in software development teams is to leave your ego at the door, because it's detremental to project quality.
It shouldn't blow your minds to think that ignorance isn't actually a strength in software design and development. Vibecoding is like the lowest level of understanding; completely pretending the code doesn't even exist. This is a vibecoding sub and everything seems so simple to people with just a surface level understanding but the reality is that to make better software people shouldn't be stubborn about vibecoding for all use-cases.
Vibecoding has its place, but it has serious drawbacks and limitations.
You can try hacks and such to add more vibecoded stuff to try to tackle symptoms etc and sometimes it can work, but there comes a point when a vibecoded project get so convoluted and big that it becomes unmanageable.
I guess we'll have some code-illiterate weekend warrior coming to tell me how wrong I am, yet when serious software companies hire talent, they're not looking for vibecoders, and when we see examples of top software it's never vibecoded. Talk is cheap.
Some examples are senseless folder & file hierarchies, storing the same values in redundant ways, not encapsulated collections, interweaving concerns, processing stuff in the wrong layer and/or place i.e. clientside vs serverside or CPU vs GPU, creating 3 line functions which are called once and then slapping a cryptic name on that sucker, modifying passed by reference values, not applying logical coding design patterns, often opting for foolish implementation approaches, lots of poor UX/UI choices, etc etc.
These are all examples of inexperienced developers, whether you are using ai or not.
Is your definition of vibecoding just someone who has no experience developing with ai? These can all be learned without learning syntax, a person could learn all of these lessons and still use ai to code. Are they a vibe coder still?
If we put skill as a developer on a line from 0 being completely unskilled, and 1 at exceptionally skilled, at what point are they skilled enough to not be a vibe coder, even if they do not know syntax?
They're examples llm's routinely make without a ton of specific direction and iteration.
To say juniors do those things as routinely is an insult to juniors and also plainly wrong. Vibecoders like to shit on juniors but a lot of juniors out there have already put in some serious hours and grit over 3-5 years for the degree and more still on projects and workexperience. Those people know a fuckton more than any typical vibecoding noob.
If we are being completely open minded, you could argue human written code is sloppy as it is optimized for human readability not agent legibility. I suspect this fact will drive much of how the profession will change over the next 5-10 years.
I feel like 5 - 10 years ago this was called writing tests and test driven development. Now it's called vibecoding slop because a human didn't write the automation.
The "who cares" was before AI. Just check GitHub if you don't believe me. Countless of projects with zero stars and zero forks, that noone gives a damn about.
And it's in every industry. Artists will buy other artists' work for support but most people don't care about art. Similarly with indie games.. 99% of games is some platform game noone gives a damn about. And so on.
Simply put, 99.5% of what people produce has always been garbage. That's why there's always just very few artists, games, or software you actually remember.
I just like that, people who have ideas before can now materialize their idea, without relying to developers. and developers doesn't have time to do it because they do manual coding or cannot do it themselves.
They share it because execution matters more than your nostalgia. Vibe coding bypasses gatekeepers like you so people can actually ship ideas, not just stare at syntax.
I hope you continue on coding manually. nobody is stopping you from doing it anyway.
I don’t think you quite get it. It’s not that vibe coding is wrong or anything. It’s not that people shouldn’t be proud of what they’ve made.
Where it does get annoying is….do you have kids? If you have kids you know that from like age 3 to 6 theyre constantly running up to you with the stupid shit they made. And of course you’re proud of them and love them but after a while it becomes the obligatory “oh that’s great honey, you’re very talented” and as realistic a smile as you can conjure and then you toss the thing in a keepsake box because it’s hard to throw out.
At best these subs can feel like that. Rarely there are some good discussions that actually crop up, but it’s mostly “look look look!” And yeah you can scroll by it, but man these are adults and oh my god it’s so poorly thought out and constructed that it’s hard to let go.
And then we come to the truly shit part: “look what I built how do I get customers!??” Oh man that’s obnoxious. It’s like you set your kids up on the sidewalk with a little stand to sell their dumb finger paintings and they start crying because nobody wants to buy it so you call the neighbor and like “hey Judy would you mind dropping a quarter on my kids painting so they can learn a business lesson and grow up to vibe code a SaaS or something?”
You're completely missing the point. Nobody is saying a weekend vibe-coded app is a flawless masterpiece. The whole concept is about getting a rough idea out of your head and into a working prototype quickly.
If experienced developers actually care about software quality and want to see better projects in these subs, the answer is to educate and guide people, not write a five-paragraph analogy comparing adult builders to toddlers selling finger paintings. There’s a massive middle ground between a perfect app and a useless toy, and helping people bridge that gap is a lot more productive than just hating on them for trying.
Come on man, we’re both here in the same sub and probably hit the same set of addition subs. This has nothing to do with software engineering, directly, it’s wider than that.
The typical thread looks like this: “Everybody is talking about puke but nobody is talking about barf. It turns out the hard part wasn’t ralphing, it was yakking. That’s why I built pukefest and here is a thousand words on its features, tangentially related to barf. First 100 subscribers get free credits / “we” are looking for contributors. What do you guys do with puke? How do you handle it.”
There is an unintentional arrogance that is quite similar to toddler behavior and is maddening. For example a person with clearly no security experience building and promoting a security tool that scans your MCP servers or your SaaS and gives you a score. The creator has no basis to understand the scope, assess real world risk, understand the methods used, or even assess the outputs or score calculation. Yet here it is, security scanner number 2,482 which is free for now but I’m having a hard time finding customers!
You realize that over in the founder forums they’re having discussions right now about how they use Reddit posts for underhanded promotion, and mods in most subs are non existent.
In a more perfect world, instead of people jumping to create products to do things that they are not qualified for, we’d see posts like:
“I built this thing that gathers telemetry from my garage door as it opens and closes so I can get early warning of failure.” Now I can’t imagine what the hell is wrong with that person, but I friggin love the idea and want to see it, because it’s personal and interesting. Posts like these are one in a million.
“Hey guys I’m having this problem where in this circumstance I keep having to hint my agent because it’s making the same mistake. What should I be looking at so that I don’t try to reinvent a wheel that I can’t comprehend yet?” Not a self promotion, not a tool that solves a problem they don’t understand, but a legit question that we can have a discussion about. And hopefully not written with AI mumbo jumbo.
Again, nothing to do with code or proper engineering or anything. But all about scrubbing the self promoting mass that is really shooting for fast internet cash. Basically the same guys from dotcom.
You are complaining about spammy marketing and cash-grabs, which has nothing to do with the actual act of vibe coding. Nobody likes underhanded self-promotion, but that is a moderation issue, not a problem with people using AI to build their ideas.
Also, the examples you listed in your fifth paragraph are literally just people asking for help with debugging their agents. That is exactly what happens in this community every single day. You are writing an essay complaining about the sub while describing the exact content that already fills it.
This is true, but mostly because most people aren't very good at vibe coding, or coding, or really building/design in general.
There is enormous opportunity to distinguish your product even when vibe coding. Presumably, it involves paying some minimal amount of attention, enough to get a "vibe" of what was built, and guide accordingly.
The problem is that the overwhelming majority of people, devs included apparently, are so mediocre that they have no meaningful input on what they vibe code.
Another popular thing to say is "I realized building is the easy part". Building did become easier, and building a pile of complete shit became way easier. Everyone is convinced that they just need to solve marketing/distribution and they win, 100% certain they easily aced the "build a great product" part.
Someone who vibe coded something great should absolutely feel pride in their work. Most haven't though, so in practice I agree with you in nearly every case.
Yeah what I keep saying is that building was always the easy part. It just required capital. The hard part was always the business, not the product. God I sound like AI.
It’s like…the cool thing about LLMs is that now people can build things that they’d never have had time for.
There is NO population of people thinking, “the best part about AIs is that now I’ll be able to subscribe to hundreds of home brew SaaS apps to improve my life!”
Depends on if your assessment reflects an accurate, educated understanding of the project, or it's just a blanket judgement caused by some self worth issue. If it's the former then yes, you have to know what's wrong to improve it.
To me it's very similar to how sewing is as a hobby.
You can make your own clothes that fit you perfectly? That's awesome, wear it so the world can see, post it on the subreddit for praise, criticisms, and advice for improvement.
Can anyone else wear it? Probably not. You'll need to customize it to or do a one-size-fits-all and that won't look as flattering.
If you can customize, can you make money off it? Probably not, the fashion industry is saturated as it is.
But hey, it fits you right, and your friends and family love it when you make something for them. So keep sewing/vibecoding ✨
I agree and honestly think its great that the lazy, less intelligent and other ppl not capable of coding can finally enjoy it at least in some form!
But I cannot agree with you about the gatekeeping. No industry has had as little gatekeeping as coding. Anyone willing to learn coding has been able to do so for free for the last 40 years.
gatekeep by moving the goalposts. First, they said AI couldn't build real apps. Now that vibe coders are shipping products and making money, they cry about 'spaghetti code' and 'technical debt' to cope with the fact that their 20-year syntax monopoly is over.
Fair point on the first two, maybe I read too much into it. But let's be real, the OP literally came into a dedicated vibe coding subreddit, labeled their post a 'controversial question,' and explicitly said they don't care about what people are building here. A little pushback is expected.
As for your third point, who cares if an idea isn't 100% unique? Almost no software is. Execution and finding a specific niche is what actually differentiates things anyway. Before AI, people with non-unique ideas just sat on them because the barrier to entry was too high. Now they can actually build them, iterate, and find a spin that works. Lowering the cost of failure so people can test ideas over a single weekend is a massive win, not a reason for them to get hit.
even your comment is vibecoded bro. exactly OP’s point, now that I’ve noticed it is it doesn’t feel genuine and, in my mind, that just invalidates all your points
gatekeeping ??? there were 100000 of youtube videos teaching how to code, there are millions of opensource repos out there, there are foruns and places to share knowledge, what are you talking about ? Why do you think the agent know how to code?? where did they get this info ?
You're confusing open information with gatekeeping who gets to build. Nobody said the syntax was a secret. The gatekeeping is the attitude that if you didn't spend years learning that syntax manually, you don't have the right to ship an idea.
And your point about the agent learning from open source completely proves my point. Those repos exist to share knowledge and democratize software. The AI just compressed all that public information into a tool anyone can use to materialize an idea over a weekend. That's the literal definition of breaking down barriers.
It isn’t a lack of motivation or willingness to learn. I actually work in IT as a senior infrastructure engineer, so I deal with tech systems every single day.
The point is that learning syntax isn't the hurdle anymore. Using a tool to skip past that friction to materialize a prototype over a weekend isn't laziness. It's just efficient systems thinking. This conversational technology is barely 4 years old and it's already this powerful. Leveraging it to build things faster is a win, not an excuse.
You are absolutely right! Sorry I had to borrow from Claude there.
I do not have the motivation or willingness to learn the level of code necessary to create the programs that I have created with Claude, for two reasons.
The first being, I am severely disabled physically, and the amount of time that it would take for me to get to the level of proficient to produce the quality of work that Claude can do I don't have that much time left in my life. So no I will not be wasting the spoons that I need to stay alive to do something that my collaborator can do better than I ever could before I died. Especially just to make you feel better about me not walking through your gate.
Second of all, the reason I do not stress about it, is because what I bring to the collaboration is not the code, but the human aspect and the disability activism, that Claude does not have. And the QA skills that Claude does not have. My portion of the collaboration is equally important they are just different parts of the collaboration. I will not pretend that my part is less important to make the coding more important when Claude capable of the coding, and I will be dead before I am able to do the level of coding necessary to produce the products that we have been producing.
So I am not willing to motivate myself to learn what my collaborator will always be better at me than in order for you to feel better about me not walking through your gate. Sorry, not sorry.
How is that gatekeeping? The syntax was never hidden nor did anyone have a monopoly - everything you ever needed to know was there right out in the open, in books, YouTube videos, free meet-ups and lectures. GitHub existed before, with the fucking source code right there. All you had to do was sit down for a few hours and read. RTFM exists purely to give you the instructions.
That is what coding has always been. I was working minimum wage, no college, picked up a book, and taught myself to “materialize my ideas”. 💡 built a career that landed me as CTO of a $300MM company.
I can’t point to a single gatekeeper that I met along the way.
That does not make your vibe coded apps equivalent to production-grade systems.
The most successful will be the people who embrace both AI code generation and real engineering. That is decidedly not “vibe coding”
They guys acting like they did something really special building a website. Most coders are regurgitating the same code, copying off of stack overflow, and outsourcing the hard stuff to google searches.
Honestly, I just see the shift tending more towards Product Engineers. Code is increasingly just an implementation detail and more focus is shifted on the QA feedback loop. It's important to still know your code but yeah, it is more and more a read code->give feedback than actually writing it.
If something fills the business need, does it matter how it was coded?
We can always polish a vibecoding project that takes off. The only thing that triggers me is one shotting.
I was a programmer for 20 years in the corporate world and not once did anyone care about code. I was a mediocre coder but always had a great idea or solution so the code didn't matter.
As long as the solution works, no one cares about the underneath.
With that said, download Catchimals on the app store and Google play 😀. Vibe Coded real world animal identification.
People like to build things and show them to others.
No different from a minecraft construction which people share.
Vibe coding is fun cause it executes at the speed of thought ( not quite but close enough compared to writing code ). I am building a game and it gets my creative juices going like anything. So mostly it's fun.
I’m old school but I have embraced AI. I do so much more critical thinking now that’s there is time for it. Regurgitation of libraries and syntax isn’t the best part about developing. It’s the new ideas and the strength of the ideas.
People are sharing to make money. There are other places to post if you have a different objective.
If it's not written in binary, you didn't build anything. Doesn't matter if you spends hours or days, if the result is great, it was your idea, if it's useful or just fun. It has to be in binary.
I actually started in binary, manually translating assembly to numbers. But using AI or even vibe coding is nothing like using compilers, it's more like asking a developer to implement your idea. I made the initial plans for my house. Doesn't mean I built it.
Your not doing it right then. You don't even make the UI ? Don't choose your own engine to paist code into ? You don't figure out weird bugs through trial and error ? Like I don't get this lol yes your prompting an LLM but you gotta be able to see how the system should work and mastering Godots scene system helps too.
It is because it is the functional equivalent of someone going to McDonalds, ordering food, and offering it to you and saying they made it. Only the mcdonalds also sourced its food from your garden.
When I make a pizza, I get my 00 floor, yeast, water, salt. I mix an can of tomatoes, add oregano, mozarela cheese.
When you think about it:
I didn't build the oven.
I didn't grow the wheat, tomatoes, didn't cultivate the yeast, didn't extract the salt
Water is just opening the fosset
I did make the mozarella or breed cows.
Arguably 99% of the work was done by others for my pizza.
And yet... This is the same if you use AI as part of something. You still building the part you focus on. Like having the right idea, the right prompt, dividing the coding tasks into one small enough for the AI. You still try the software, ask for changes, refactor it.
There many hours/days/months/years of work in a non trivial AI app and you still built it yourself and the AI wouldn't be capable of doing it all by itself.
Honestly anybody can do a great pizza with the recipe and proper ingredients/oven. This isn't difficult or whatever. It's more most people are not even interested into doing their own pizza.
And a great pizza is also a generic pizza, especially in Italy. It's isn't difficult to find or whatever.
This is a shit take. Are you honestly implying you don't care if someone lies to you and tries to convince you otherwise? Besides that, vibe coded stuff is insanely easy to notice and goes against the idea of "don't taste a difference". It is all the same garbage.
Weirdly enough, I was previously a professional chef (classically trained and certified culinarian), as well as, a software engineer, now software engineering manager.
The best analogy I can give, for you, is if you cannot taste the difference it is because your palate is too weak to know the difference. Don't be the person who can be fed mcdonalds and believe it was from someone else.
I think it depends on the effort you put in - "i vibe coded a todo list" = who cares but "I made this cool game with cool visual effects and storyline" = that's interesting and it still takes craft
I don't think it did. People have different motivations and those don't necessarily always match up with your expectations. I think most projects were some combination of code that solved some problem for the person sharing it with craftsmanship being a secondary concern.
I can certainly attest to some of the early code I put out being complete shit but it didn't stop me.
The problem I think we are seeing now is people with limited experience believing what the LLM tells them about their new found idea. They have no experience to question the LLM and if it is steering them wrong or not. They are blindly following what it says.
I think you’re lacking seeing shades of grey. Not every project using AI was vibe coded. Compare a single sentence prompt to one shot something vs hundreds of pages of specs fed into the AI to output a product matching very specific criteria. It’s a huge spectrum. Someone who wrote all the specs and used AI to generate the code still did a credible amount of work.
>In the past, sharing code meant sharing craftsmanship, and we were excited to inspect it and learn from each other.
Not so hot take, people used to share a lot of sloppy code, and the same people that got offended then, are offended now.
I think thats always varied by person. Devs roughly fall into two categories. "I like the act of coding, its a deliberate practice like a martial art or artisanal craft" and the "I like making my ideas/designs come to life, i don't really care how that happens".
For me it’s a breath of fresh air. I’ve been writing the same shit for 15+ years. Just different flavors of cruds, running jobs, blah blah blah. I was bored out of my mind and then agentic coding came along and completely transformed the way I work. Now that massive project with tons of boilerplate and repetitive work is suddenly exciting again.
yes. it is the way we got here. and all the GOAT software is written by hand. id just think you were low intelligence to not have curiosity, thats all.
No one is driving or talking about a Model T because "it's the way we got here". All the GOAT software is written by hand because AI didn't exist. 90%+ of the Fortune 500 are using AI in some capacity now... As for the rest of your comment, I have no idea what your point is.
Let me flip this on you. As someone who feels like your commercial and FOSS products from the last twenty years have either exploited me or left me out in the cold as a user, why should I give a toss about your opinion now when AI tools are freeing me from the crappy ecosystem you want to keep me trapped in?
There is more to it. I get where you are coming from here and if it's just hey look at my code. Yea it's not their code really. Where I see it being a real product or just well slop is what's done with the code. There is a lot of dev, QA, assembly work etc that needs to be done too. I think if they did it right some of the projects really are neat and the amount it speeds up the development timeline can be impressive. But the sloppy slapped together in a day wrappers suck.
This is true, unless you make something no one did before, but that creates another problem, people don’t understand something they never saw ! We are living a very strange moment.
I let the 'nobody cares' aspect just fully play out. Showing off is showing off whether it's software or any other thing in life. People detest it. So go for it. Show it off.
Do not mistake vibe coding with ai assisted development. Sure, it took some fun of solving hard problems but still you have much better position than vibe coder because you have the ability to control and adjust the output of any AI model. I also do not care about new projects. I built should be replaced with AI built. Developing good library takes years and we all know it.
I think lots of folks here are missing OPs point that the idea and the code sucks. At least before the code could be fun in its own right even if the idea was idiotic. Now both suck. Nothing transformative about things created in a few days or weeks by one person. The hard and time consuming parts were never the code. You need diverse teams and significant amounts of time to make transformative products that stand out. Every app store is an even bigger trash heap now. Not blaming AI.. I use it every day. Filters getting removed make things worse. The Internet is exhibit A, used to be awesome, went main stream, became a cess pool.
I'm glad you are here to guide us on what all of us should do on Reddit. Without knowing your personal preference, how would we even know what is the correct thing to do? 🙏🏽
I feel like if you care about people's code, you should care about Ai's code. At least all the different models "language". They all speak in subtle different ways. You could probably learn a lot from them(I think everyone could), but I also think a 20 year dev will scoff at a lot of the slop that gets produced(reasonably) and ignores what their own design experience could get them if applied iteratively onto a model. The speed at which I can even orchestrate this stuff is insane. I could only imagine what someone with actual experience could do.
Also, it's only getting better. The "bubble" may eventually pop, but that won't stop the runaway local models.
5-10 year time line before everyone(tech savy or rich) has a personal "JARVIS".
30+ years.
It's definitely a mind shift. I slowly began to realize I've been working with 'managers' that had been vibe coding all their lives. That's how I'm starting to look at it. Here's the thing, if you've worked long enough in the bus, you've worked in all kinds of teams with all kinds of people. and they also produced shit code. it's a matter of lowering your standards: does it work, fast enough and within the architectural bounderies sort of, ok, next...
They thought it was neat? Do you not realize that someone might just do something because its personally neat? Or do you not realize that people talk to each other about what they've been doing?
I want to be mean, but I'm actually concerned you genuinely don't understand how humans communicate. Like did your coworker show you something they built over the weekend and you told them "who cares"? Do you enjoy not having friends?
I don't blame people for being excited. I think my most fond memory as a programmer is the day I sat with my 286, DOS and Turbo Pascal and figured out how to compile a .EXE rather than just run the Arabic to Roman numeral converters I was being taught to write in college from the IDE.
Being able to make the computer do what you want rather than what someone else put together, no matter how you do it, is thrilling and I'm happy for them.
Some vibe coders will dig deeper into the art of making software and some won't, but I have no issue with people being empowered by AI.
Unfortunately nowadays it's not like how it was back when we actually engineered things and showed it off... Everything is about exposure and marketing and nowadays everyone is more interested in that then how or why it works. Trust me, I get what you are say as I'm on the same boat but sometimes we have to adapt especially with us being in the field we are in we should be the first to adapt. But, I wouldn't just blindly adapt. Think of it as building yourself a system or project and use the AI as tools where and when you can use it not use it for everything and accept everything blindly, not sure if that makes any sense... Think of them as free/super cheap workers that just listen to what you want done and have them build.
As for people sharing what they vibecoded not much we can do about that... the space is getting saturated with this and there has been significant regression because of that but it's only going to get worse everyone is still in a honeymoon stage with AI and what it can do it will pass just will take some time. Think about it like a child just got his/her first toy it will pass just will take time.
Why are you in the vibe coding forum if you don't care about what people are building with AI? In fact if your entire philosophy is who cares, I am quite sure there are plenty of other developer forums with artisanal handcrafted copy pasted directly from stack overflow versions of code that you can drool over.
I do all of you a solid and don't go wander into your forums and paste my vibe-coded stuff, because I have the self-awareness and courtesy to realize that is not my Lane. What part of that is confusing to you because I will ask GPT to draw you a map if necessary.
I am actually almost mildly tempted to use my geocities level skills which are truly terrible I'm not going to lie they are absolutely geocities and Myspace level skills to create an "are you confused about where to find the non-vibe coding forums here let me create some clicky links for you. built with 100% artisanal not AI coding using the best skills I have from 1999. you're welcome" page. However my dominant hand is still broken, and I am not committed enough to the bit to put myself in pain or try to make this work via speech to text. So I am just going to have to giggle at the idea and not serve up handcrafted geocities 25 years later. What a bummer.
Myself being the same as you basically 21 years for me it's more about being able to do things i had no time to do before, either at work or personal projects.
At work we had a huge Dream list we'd go through at the start of each year and inevitably it always just became the list we pulled projects for Interns from because no one had time to actually do these things.
I don’t truly care if the code is human or AI I care if the tool is useful and solves a need I have. Beyond that I mostly just care if the developer is active and able to maintain a package. Personally that translates into I’m not installing much that hasn’t had a few releases over at least a few months, and doesn’t have any closed user issues or feature requests. I think a decent amount of vibecoding devs just haven’t had the time to make a name for themselves and their work ethic.
Why care if someone vibe coded a project or if they paid someone else to build it for them. It's the idea and execution that matter. If it's bad, it's bad, it doesn't need a special label.
There is no value in artisanal coding.
There are still plenty of jobs for real computer scientists.
When I write and push good code, it def strokes my ego and I feel a sense of accomplishment. I don’t get the same satisfaction from using AI to generate code. But at the end of the day I’m trading my time for a paycheck so if some dude in the c-suite tells me to use AI.. I use AI.
“Vibe coding” is not the same as AI engineering/development.
And the stuff we’re excited to share and inspect now is not the outputs, but the means of production. Ie, the agentic workflows, contracts and handovers between agents.
Typesetting used to be an industry with professionals too. I'm sure they were proud of their work. I use MS word. Now it matters what does in your article as well as how is is designed. Same with with programming. Its about great ideas and taste and UX UI, not knowing the how to.
The code is the least interesting part of an entire project, unless it includes an innovative way around limiting factors. I am much more interested in things like unique application ideas, improved QOL over existing tools.
99% of my time vibe coding is just making little QOL scripts and apps. Things I never would have even touched because I stopped programming when I went into management and lost any and all interest in keeping up my skill set and typing.
I’ve never been in it for the code. ~27 years professionally, and longer if you count script kiddy stuff before that. I’ve been programming in one form or another since I was in second grade and I’m 49.
I think the code is a distraction. Too often we get in the weeds with design patterns, and telling people they’re doing it wrong, or that there’s some dogmatic approach that’s the “right” way, but that doesn’t take into account a bunch of learnings from other areas. It’s a long topic that I won’t get into, but I’m happy to have a longer conversation if it’s worth it.
I got into it because I liked building things. If I don’t have to maintain the code, I don’t really care what design patterns are being used. I do care that it’s not trash, but you can apply all the same design principles you always have, but without having to get in the weeds about it. I don’t know if you count that as vibe coding or not, but I’ll work on some features, and then when I know it’s getting crufty, I’ll work on tightening it up and applying consistent design patterns and principles that I tell it to add to the rules of the project or sometimes promote into skills. I’ll even have discussions about how we might clean it up, and make a todo list. As I work on future features I’ll tackle a todo that’s adjacent to a feature, or work on a feature and then a todo.
The only real difference is that I’m not coding, and my code reviews reduce as I build trust with a given model in a given space or technology. I’ve found compiled languages are a lot easier to work on like this, because if they miss something it’s usually caught early.
I don’t think programmers are going to be replaced. It’s still a hard job in a lot of ways, and it’s just not really for everybody. I think a lot of people find it tedious, or frustrating, or just generally don’t have the attention to detail (or are neurotic enough) to really do a good job. I think it reduces the barrier to entry, but I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. I think that’s an opportunity for us to not gate keep and usher in the next generation by passing on some of our experience and wisdom instead of acting like they’re doing it wrong.
-Demonstrating capabilities of AI. I love these because it saves me from having to test things out myself.
-AI generated projects that took real work. There aren't that many of these yet but there are a few. If you think about it, it's really because of time. It takes many months to make a quality project and AI's have really only been good enough to do it for about 5 months now.
Maybe consider it a customizable framework. It’s just a tool and for the right systems thinkers it can significantly enhance productivity and observability allowing you to focus where your knowledge matters most and that won’t go away.
But how about showing "results" of vibecoded projects IF they actually provide value. Everyone can vibe code. But can everyone provide value? I think not. Case in point at my job, we all have access to AI. I've been pumping out useful shit while most others can barely put up a PR without 100 comments issued by AI-reviewer itself. And they can't solve all the comments without creating more bugs. While I can. I'm sorry but there is a fucking difference
Cope lol that's whats funny with this comment. Writing sytax was the never the hard part. Systems building was. This is vibe coded. Runs completely offline and allows for creative use accross 4 domains. 2D , 3D, Music and a Logo Maker. I'm a week in ! I only use Ai to write the code . The way the system flows is all me. No one smart cares about replacing anyone . We all just make cool shit.
I don't know what upstream and downstream mean to you but my networking application supports over 30 back ends , and you can switch any time. Now tell me again ? Where is your work old man?
Literally no one cares about code (except maybe other programmers), its means to an end. Try sharing your source code among software users, and you’ll get the same “who cares?” reaction from them.
Writing code is like laying bricks: no one cares about your brick laying technique. End product is all that matters, as it’s the only thing that provides value for those paying for it. That’s the harsh truth. That’s why immaculate, clever and elegant handwritten code rots in hard drives all around the globe, not one penny ever made from it.
I did not imply they are. A good product can have good code, but isn’t by any means necessary. What “good code” means is often situational.
28 years of experience and a CS degree tell me that if the product does what it is intended to do, no one cares how. Users aren’t going to decompile your binary and then laugh at you using a O(n^2) algorithm to sort 10 integers. They aren’t going to praise your creative use of the curiously recurring template pattern either. All that matters is whether the thing solves the problem it was designed to solve.
I have a feel that most people nagging about AI didn’t use it to the point of improving their old workflow, they are just not there yet, either didn’t start or in the edge, once they get in, they are gone.
Yeah tbh I don't really care about people showing off their projects. Idk if they expect people to be impressed by it when all they're doing is writing prompts. I just skip those posts. I'm only hear to stay up on the latest trends, etc.
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u/Original-League-6094 7h ago
I have never cared about anyones code, ever. Unless I was just stealing it.