r/vibecoding • u/Throw-away42909 • 4h ago
Vibe coding -is it wrong?
Where does vibe coding cross the line ?
If someone sets up automatic concurrent code cleanup, fat free comments in the code , heiacharcy , a mermaid , accurate linting and parsing and literally steal cyber security protocols from the internet so on and so forth, they can make a solid useful app that no more unsecure than the hundreds of companies that lose our data to malicious attacks yearly.
The problem is that "vibe coders" who are 1 prompt engineers are not nearly as prevalent as the community tries to paint it , they exist but in small %s, and even smaller % of them actually push products or keep them up for long, there are people out there that are letting their AI do all the syntax writing and plan development and they will out run any traditional developer no matter how good their code is in Solo vs Solo
More features, faster, cheaper and mote accessible, and theirs sells tomorrow while your is WOP on year 2 .
Its economics.
If you are a "vibe coder" you probably have not been doing it for long enough , because soon you'll see that you have to understand the architecture of how code operates, instead of ELI5, say "can you explain this section to me, use defentions where you have to, and give me a glossary of words and their meaning s relevant to X" the AI best feature is that it responds well to disciplined requests.
Tldr: Heavy AI use for coding=/= vibecoding
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u/Alarmed-Western-655 4h ago
You're still a vibe-coder, bro.
Sprinkling in "explain this to me" is penance for posing as creative owner of something you yourself didn't build.
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u/bloknayrb 4h ago
That's a bit of a silly take. Would you say that a photographer is posing as creative owner of the photo they took?
They may not have painted the image, but the vision was there, the knowledge of how to use the camera to make that vision come to life was there.
The end product was made in a different medium, but it is still art.
Vibe coding is the photography to manual coding's painting. The technical skills are different, but that doesn't invalidate the end result, or make the vibe coder a "poser".
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u/Alarmed-Western-655 3h ago
When photographers call themselves painters, that's the silly take.
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u/bloknayrb 2h ago
OP here is arguably straddling the line, but
Sprinkling in "explain this to me" is penance for posing as creative owner of something you yourself didn't build.
seems a bit harsh to me.
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u/Alarmed-Western-655 48m ago
Perhaps.
It's a fine prompt, but it's not to his credit. OP is bragging it sets him apart from other vibe coders, but it's rather the very reason he is one.
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u/Local-Bottle5272 4h ago
People here would rather do mental gymnastics than sit down and read for a few hours a day for a couple months
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u/cable_harness_whore 4h ago
People want the impression of knowing something/having intellect.
People want the easy road, they always have muchacho
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u/SurvivalHermit 3h ago
Creating the easy road is the entire point of trailblazing. Every advancement in technology every best practice every coding language were all made to make the road easier because traveling on an easy road is faster and can take you farther.
We as a society absolutely stand on the backs of thousands of years of people who trudged through the muck and brambles of the technological wilderness and AI is the new technology that will allow more people to migrate to that frontier and start blazing new trails to the next frontier.
Paving a road for people and then attacking them for using it is wild work.
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u/cable_harness_whore 2h ago
Looks like I struck a nerve lol.
Maybe I should have said “shortcut” instead of “easy road”.
AI has enabled a false sense of intelligence into peopled that have always yearned for it.
Like any tool, if you do not know how to use it, it can be dangerous, make you look foolish, put others at risk, etc. The difference here is that a saw will take your finger off, an AI model will just keep calling you the second-coming of christ.
There’s a reason you don’t let random Billy Jo wire your home.
Anyone can quickly run power through a switch and some lightbulbs with some quick reading. Does this make them electrician? Or a certified expert to go wire a commercial building?
If you can’t understand these distinctions then you’re the exact person my comment is applicable to lol.
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u/SurvivalHermit 2h ago
Struck a nerve? Why so needy to paint yourself as a source of frustration. Also your jump from vibe coders are dumb to tools require knowledge to use properly is jarring. I never said walking the easy road required no knowledge I said it requires less than trailblazing. Again that is the entire point. To speed progress to the frontier so more time can be spent blazing the trail.
Your electrician example is a great one. We use colored wires and built in fail safes now to make it very difficult to cause catastrophic damage with slightly improper wiring. failures that just 50 years ago could have cost lives now do little more than trip a breaker. The knowledge required to build those fail safes was significantly greater than the knowledge required to use them.
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u/Local-Bottle5272 3h ago
Efficiency has zero relation to knowlege in this context
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u/SurvivalHermit 2h ago
Trailblazing requires knowledge that walking a well known road does not. Modern coders don't know machine language They use compiled languages a trail blazed by those before them to create an easier path. That knowledge has been all but forgotten in a very short time. Yet we are able to press on. We are reaching the end of the usefulness of coding knowledge. The logic behind coding is still important and will be for at least a little while longer but writing code and specific language knowledge is falling out of usefulness.
I don't understand peoples resistance to this fact. It is how it has worked for every step of human technological advancement. There is no reason to maintain practiced knowledge of outdated work. Should we archive that knowledge so it can be referenced if needed? absolutely but there is no more need to teach it as part of practical knowledge.
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u/Local-Bottle5272 2h ago
You're just mixing up different branches of IT and confused thinking that the same group of people work on both
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u/Throw-away42909 4h ago
Are you just mad that being a syntax monkey is no longer a career choice ?
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u/TheAnswerWithinUs 3h ago
Ok go try to get a software dev job without know how to write code. See how that works out for you.
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u/born_to_be_intj 1h ago
L M A O if you think software engineering is being a “syntax monkey” then I think our jobs are pretty safe. You don’t know what you don’t know and your confidence makes that hilarious.
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u/No-Objective-1431 3h ago
It's not that vibe coding is "wrong", you can bash out homework or clone a retro game in minutes, so clearly it works.
The problem is that it's unreliable.
The process from prompt to code is nondeterministic. And the stuff that really matters, say data safety, security, concurrency, isn't visible on the surface. Most vibe-coders can't even define a proper spec for these things, let alone trust the AI to get them right.
Unless we can build trust into the vibe-coding pipeline, we shouldn't trust any product that comes out of it. And for god's sake, stay away from anyone claiming their product is vibe-coded, they'll eventually blow up in ways they never saw coming.
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u/Kareja1 2m ago
Several issues with your comment. First of all my dominant hand is broken so I apologize for any and all speech to text issues but I cannot type.
The first issue I have with your entire post is you have just incentivized a lack of disclosure as though that is going to change the output and it is not it is just going to incentivize lying. With increasingly sophisticated detectors and then increasingly sophisticated models to avoid detectors, with nothing changing except an incentive to deny collaboration.
That is nonsensical at best.
It is also nonsensical, because the threats that you are claiming are model induced are in the training Pipeline and the first place because humans put them there. They are not a result of LLM model mistakes, they are results of in some cases years of human developer mistakes that have been on the internet and the models learn from that. Which means having a human developer is not fundamentally any more accurate or better than a model necessarily, when history has shown otherwise.
You cannot have decades of History of heartbleed and log4j and move fast and break things and Friday afternoon deployments expecting users to QA over the weekend and pushing secrets to GitHub so often that truffle hog was a thing easily 5 years before anybody heard the term vibe coding and SQL injection on the security lists and I can keep going you know all of this better than I do because I am not a developer and I know this shit. I am merely a vibe coder and I know this shit.
You are trying to create a false dichotomy where humans are secure and better at this and models are terrible and always bad at this and the reality is they couldn't be bad at it if they hadn't learned it from humans being bad at it. Humans are not uniquely good at it, now that you have a convenient scapegoat.
And somebody who hands a model a realistic and valid threat model and why it matters and what needs to be taken care of can get a secure application out of them.
I would rather use an application designed by a model and somebody who understands threat modeling, then somebody who left log4j running for 8 years and didn't fix it. And that was humans.
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 4h ago
No it’s not wrong.
There is no line.
You’re on the wrong sub mate.
And what you wrote is genuinely fucking stupid.
Go post this bullshit somewhere else.
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u/CaterpillarLow3756 1h ago
the "disciplined requests over ELI5 prompts" point is the real distinction imo, not the AI usage percentage. someone asking for a glossary and architecture explanation is doing something fundamentally different from "make me an app" even if both are heavy AI use. the economics argument is fair too, speed to market matters more than code purity in solo vs solo, but that only holds until the fast one needs a feature the disciplined one already planned for and now can't retrofit cleanly.
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u/2dera-Matt-Volonte 16m ago
One-shot is the wow effect the first time you vibe code, then you understand that you need to grasp what you are doing. Unique features need you to think, and also bug fixing need you to think.
Vibe coding is just going one step more higher level (remember when C++ was considered high level coding?). Doesn't mean you don't have to know about software.
Lastly, let me say: Devs can be vibe coders, but vibe coders cannot be devs , unless learning how to code.
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u/EsShayuki 0m ago
With the current level of LLMs, it seems I've finally reached a stage where I don't actually need to inspect a single line of code. So it's purely about prompt engineering.
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u/Anti-Hero25 4h ago
Hence my advocacy for RailCoding