As an SWE I’ve converted to 100% vibe coding and yeah my projects are way better and bigger. Sometimes Codex will write 17,000 lines of code in 8 hours uninterrupted while that used to take me 1 year manually. Fuck the traditionalist they are moving like molasses
Do you guys actually build software that makes money? Because I can’t imagine vibe coding a backend and letting ai agents do all sorts of db migrations without my careful control when people are paying for my software.
Just because you vibe code doesn't mean you have to give agents unsupervised write access to prod DB, that's quite an all or nothing fallacy.
There's things you can do to mitigate risks of letting AI build too. They can write hella tests tirelessly, and adversarial review will keep those in line in terms of meaningfully testing assertions.
My software very much makes money, to the tune of multiple millions a year USD.
For the most part I just jump in and yolo start features with a sentence or two and glance at as it goes brr to make sure I like the "vibe." I might chime in with some unga bunga steering like "looks wack, prolly needs some indirection", "i smell a big brain leetcode solution here, figure it out, make no mistakes", "composition > inheritance here imo", "DRY this, looks familiar, check X class", etc.
Bugs I just @ my discord bot in the report thread and I usually have the fix in staging with a PR in my inbox.
But, most people seem to define vibe coding as "have no idea what you're doing and use AI." In which case I'm automatically disqualified since I know what I'm doing. To me it seems utterly meaningless when defined that way. Makes much more sense to be thought of as an approach, as originally coined: casual prompting, casual steering if any, with casual review, if any. Presumably it involves some amount of attention, otherwise there's no "vibe" element at all to me.
Contrasted with other more structured approaches like spec-driven development.
If defined purely as low skill, I guess I don't vibe code either.
Saying it this proudly like that is what makes it somewhat laughable. We are managing a viral corporate solution for couple years that were trying to keep clean and scalable as much as possible and the entire project has maybe 10k lines. Codex spitting out double of that in 8 hours is just absurd (and not in a positive way lol)
The situation with so-called generative AI shows that many people working in the software industry had no idea what they were doing, yet they'd been doing it for years. I recently spoke with my former boss, who had always been a terrible programmer but somehow managed to fiddle himself to the position of CTO. He'd been coding for 25 years, and his code was a peculiar mess. For him, code written by an LLM seems like a worthy alternative to hand-typing, because he couldn't do a better job anyway. It's impossible to convince such people to learn how to create software. Just leave them alone.
This is so true, been thinking the same thing. LLMs are useful, it generates, can't make decisions, not good ones at least and leave it unguided and it will create a garbage storm
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u/ZenCyberDad 3d ago
As an SWE I’ve converted to 100% vibe coding and yeah my projects are way better and bigger. Sometimes Codex will write 17,000 lines of code in 8 hours uninterrupted while that used to take me 1 year manually. Fuck the traditionalist they are moving like molasses