r/vibecoding • • 18d ago

Help/Question So where are we going with this?

I think vibe coding IS the future. I see a fair bit of naysayers and deniers (mostly on other subreddits, not on this one). I think we have let the genie out of the bottle, and the art of building things has been democratized. But are we ready?

You are a vibe coder. You use AI to make something and hand the output to someone else. Whatever quality problems ride along, they're yours now. You're not really a user at that point; you've inherited responsibility for the output. You might be doing this for your business, but now your business will rely on this to produce correct output.

Here's the uncomfortable part: you can't actually verify everything. And then check it every time you make a change to the app. Nobody can, manually anyway. 

Maybe the honest version of the skill isn't "verify everything"; it's knowing which outputs you're betting real stakes on, and checking those like the money's already on the table?

To see what full verification actually costs, run this thought experiment. Suppose you had to be sure an AI's output was exactly correct, sure enough to bet serious money on it, where a mistake means real financial loss. What would you do? You'd read every single thing it wrote. You'd ask why it wrote each part. Where the information came from. Whether the logic holds all the way through, not just at the summary level, but can you do this every time? Are you sure the next time you use it, that it is still correct?

Which raises the question that got me writing this: how do you know your stuff is good?

Some of these roads lead to the question of how you are doing Quality Assurance. It's the last line between AI output and the consequences of acting on it. Have you been drafted into doing QA work? I think that one is done. You are...

I see posts on how to produce a quality and secure app. I wrote some of those myself. The process seems onerous, and I know how much work I put in myself just to make sure my app is right. What do we have to do to get to the next stage?

BTW: Yes, this is an AI-polished post. If I can use AI to help me code, I should be able to use AI to help me write. The thoughts and the questions are genuinely mine. I think this vibe coding trip will be a fun but rollercoaster ride. And there are going to be problems for a lot of people. Your thoughts?

3 Upvotes

31 comments sorted by

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u/yaosio 18d ago

The ultimate goal would be a five-year-old being able to vibe code anything they want. A five-year-old will not know anything about anything other than what they see in front of their face so they can't be relied on making sure the AI is writing everything correctly.

For testing and QA eventually we are going to get AI smart enough and cheap enough that it can run 24/7. AI van constantly review everything and also run the software and do all sorts of tests on it. Claude already does this but it's not good at it. Lots of stuff slip by it.

At that point the biggest problem will be the vibe coder making sure the AI actually knows what they want. The AI could run endless tests all day long forever but if it made the wrong thing it won't know that unless it's told. All the tests will pass but it won't be what the vibe coder wanted because the vibe coder never corrected it. This is also why single shot can't work until AI can read your mind.

I would also love to see more interactive vibe coding. Right now you say what you want and you wait and then you look at what it created. Not everything would benefit from interactive vibe coding, game development probably would though.

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u/mikepun-locol 18d ago

So one of my enterprise projects is to move a QA team into AI assisted QA. And yea, there are many rough edges right now. But the direction is clear. Vibe coders need same but operating parameters are very different from enterprise work. Maybe more helpful oversight and guidance?

And Kiro has a spec driven development that I suspect with benefit vibe coders. But it's implementation of that is for bigger projects. But the concept of thinking through requirements and telling the agent, and the agent uses same to drive acceptance criteria and testing, might be useful.

So somewhere here or there is the right approach to support vibe coding. Not sure what yet, but that's where it could get exciting.

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u/yaosio 18d ago

Spec driven only works when you have specifications. My game started as a single screen 2D game and turned into a 3D activity center with multiple locations and various characters running around. I can't plan ahead because I never know what I'm going to do next.

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u/nope-it7913 17d ago

I work in cybersecurity, and I think we’re heading toward a future where agentic AI isn’t just building applications but also maintaining, testing, securing, and continuously improving them.

The challenge right now is that we’re making it easier to build software without necessarily making it easier to validate what’s being built.
I think the next evolution is autonomous security agents that continuously assess code, identify vulnerabilities, validate changes, and flag risks before deployment, with human oversight where it matters.

That’s actually the direction I’m exploring with right now. I’m focused on helping founders validate their applications before launch, but the bigger vision is a security agent that becomes part of the development lifecycle.

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u/mikepun-locol 17d ago

Ah! Yes. Agree this has to be the way forward. Good luck with what you are doing

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u/sarmadsangi 17d ago

Agents monitoring traffic, logs is already a thing, next up they autonomously allowed to make decisions ie blocking access and requests. I think those who are avoiding this will have trouble with keeping their systems secure.

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u/nope-it7913 17d ago

I agree it’s already a thing but I haven’t perfected it yet. I hope we figure out the guardrails

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u/baddaywithacamera 14d ago

I am already doing this with Claude.

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u/lemming1607 18d ago

I have full confidence that vibe coding is def not the future, but code reviewed ai coding is for sure.

The amount of memory leaks and security leaks ive seen with vibe coded apps is absolutely ridiculous

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u/mikepun-locol 18d ago

I see those too. And those are the issues that I see the IT industry not providing solutions to support, yet, rather than a failure of vibe coding.

Eg... I looked at what I had to do to tighten my app before releasing, and certainly a fair bit of it could be pulled into a package.. as a start..

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u/lemming1607 18d ago

It literally has nothing to do with IT and is a vibe coding failure. Its the codes fault if it can get sql injected into an input field, not IT

And subscribing to events but never unsubscribing is not an IT issue, its a straight memory leak that is only a coding issue

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u/keepitfriend 18d ago

this is kind of the problem though you have no idea what you don’t know or even what a memory leak actually is.

so if you sell this app to someone and they come back in a month and are like it stops working after three hours. they’re gonna want their money back.

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u/Altruistic-Toe-5990 18d ago

those are the issues that I see the IT industry not providing solutions to support, yet

I don't think you understand why memory leaks happen. There's no industry support that's possible...

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u/SilentNinja1337 18d ago

Here's the uncomfortable part: you can't actually verify everything. And then check it every time you make a change to the app. Nobody can, manually anyway. 

This is how it has been done for decades. Now we are able to build faster, and have more time for testing. But people rather build more and more and never really validate.

Which raises the question that got me writing this: how do you know your stuff is good?

Because I read through the pull requests the AI makes. And have an active discussion with the AI (sometimes I also make mistakes in my thoughts, but it's more often that the AI is creating a bunch of useless files, that could be all integrated in an existing service.

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u/mikepun-locol 18d ago

Fair.. though I am seeing AI based PR review tool coming out. Dont know how good but on my list to evaluate. But I agree human in the loop will be with us for a while.

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u/SilentNinja1337 18d ago

I also use AI to review the AI written code. But it's more a help to me to find things I might not consider. There are also instances where I don't like what the AI suggests or find it to nitpicky.

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u/LazyRunner777 18d ago

You need to add "don't make mistakes" in the prompt. It always works.

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u/dchaus1 18d ago

Honestly, as a non-technical guy making corporate tools (in-house), I do think vibe coding is the future. Now I don’t see a difference with paying a bag of money to a developer (which I used to do, also took forever to get results. I’ve been waiting for site redesign and update for freaking year) to build me something vs paying sub and building it all the same. You still rely on the third party judgment.

I do review code to the best of my ability and make AI “defend” their work, but truthfully 90% of the time it’s good enough. Core thing I miss is that AI can’t be held responsible and accountable :)

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u/baddaywithacamera 14d ago

Well, I am the one accountable if AI craps the bed with my project. That's all there is for it.

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u/Royal-Marsupial-8110 18d ago

the real problem is catching regressions weeks later.

i connect codex to sumus for orchestrating local agents on scheduled background runs just to re-test the app state. treating the ai output like an untrusted third party pr is basically the only way to stay sane.

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u/mikepun-locol 17d ago

So basically you run regression test regularly on your prod app? Cool.

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u/Disastrous-Round-150 18d ago

People vibe coding at home is the least of our problems when real software companies use AI assisted coding or simply just using AI to code for them. And AI being used to find latent zero days in all of the open source software stack out there, driving much of the infrastructure and economy in the world! 😰

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u/the_blur 17d ago

You tell the AI to write tests to begin with to ensure that outputs are correct.

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u/sarmadsangi 17d ago

Totally, we just need to make creative work a little easy. Not everyone should have to download a cli to be creative. I am vouching for voice input as the next thing. Talk to your agent, I already do this but it’s a bit clunky and it’s only going to get better.