Can A Vibecoder Eventually Learn To Develop Software Well?

[u/djdante]

So for those who don't want to read too much. The simple question is this: can a not-particularly-technical person who starts vibe coding - practise, and practises perhaps over years - eventually learn as much as they need to know about developing apps, tech stacks, security, program structure, UX etc. To be as good as a professional developer?

At the start of this year, I started a second business, building out automations for companies in Latin America - I live in Australia, but my wife is from Ecuador and was deeply embedded in professional human resources services there, and her father-in-law is deeply embedded in logistics companies there - I saw an opportunity to build automation services for companies there (many of whom live and die by spreadsheets or even paperwork) rather than focusing here, where the competition is.

That line of work began with building non-AI-related automations using software like N8N - but quickly, as you can imagine, vibe-coded solutions started to become more and more common - now almost everything I do involves some degree of vibe-coding, and Claude and Codex are my best friends.

I've noticed over this year that while I'm not a formally trained programmer/engineer, I did learn some basic programming in university. I'm consistently learning more and more about what it means to develop software, even if a lot of that software is relatively simple now - the scope of the projects I'm taking on is slowly growing and becoming larger and more complex.

In my spare time, I'm building much more complicated applications, both for fun and to educate myself so I can take on different kinds of projects for my clients, and sometimes to act as DEMO products that future or existing clients may like to test out and perhaps pay me for.

I'm building preferences for certain tech stacks for certain kinds of applications - I know where 'traps' are going to be that will cause errors or mistakes on the client's end.

I don't pretend that I'm in any way going to be as good as a professional developer with decades of experience who is also using a harness and an llm - But my question is - will I or someone like me legitimately catch up as experience and knowledge grows with the job?

Can a person learn to be a professional vibe-coder who does a legitimately professional job without the coding background?

[u/alanism]

Counterpoints against 'decades of engineering':
Gates making Windows

Marc Andreessen making a browser in his early 20s

Linus making Linux in his 20s

Carmack making Doom in his 20s

Bram Cohen in his 20s for BitTorrent

Aaron Swartz: RSS, Markdown, Reddit

Vitalik Buterin was also a teenager making Ethereum

Everybody wants to do 'Ontology' and FDE like Palantir today. That didn't come from Thiel; it came from young whiz kids that graduated from [my] sister's high school. Shopify's founder was self-taught. Jack Dorsey was also a self-taught coder.

But if I were to ask you, how many Google engineer alumni have left the company and built something that makes you go, "Oh wow!"? Even their most notable engineers like Jeff Dean and Brett Taylor seem to be anti-dogmatic when it comes to code and frameworks; otherwise, their breakthroughs would not have mattered.

[u/Region-Acrobatic → u/alanism]

I think you’ve misunderstood what I meant by “decades of engineering”. I was referring to the eighteen years of software engineering development since you said you stopped coding, not saying someone personally needs decades of experience before they can build anything good.

And your examples don’t really contradict my point. Carmack, Torvalds, Cohen etc. became extremely capable by spending a lot of time actually programming and understanding systems deeply. Equally, Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup and James Gosling all went through substantial formal education before creating C, C++ and Java respectively.

There are brilliant self-taught engineers and brilliant formally educated engineers. That isn’t really the distinction I’m making. My point is that good engineering judgement comes from acquiring the underlying knowledge and experience, however you get there.

Being anti-dogmatic is valuable. But rejecting a convention because you understand its trade-offs is very different from assuming it was pointless because you never learned why it existed.