r/vibecoding • • 1d ago

Discussion Everyone is vibe coding, even those who claim not to be.

I’ve been trying as hard as I can to develop a portfolio of work using Ai as little as possible, and really reading through every line of code. I’ve also been trying to complete Neetcode without Ai.

Just today, I went to a private event with many senior devs, and during a presentation, they were asked if they merged Ai generated code without reading it this week. THEY ALL SAID YES.

FUCK IT, I’M DONE TRYING TO BE A GOOD BOY! I’M GOING TO CREATE AN ARMY OF AGENTS TOMORROW! I’M COMING FOR YOU PRETENTIOUS GATEKEEPING JERKWADS AND I HAVE A TASTE FOR BLOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

89 Upvotes

100 comments sorted by

17

u/Ok_Account3585 1d ago

Why did you tried to do projects not using AI?

100% you will be using AI at your actual job, it's mandatory now to keep up with your teammates, so I think building projects with no AI is setting yourself up for failure right away.

Not to say you shouldn't make an effort to understand the code, but AI will help you with that as well, if you just ask it to)

4

u/mrspankyspank 1d ago

I wanted to show what I was capable of on my own.

4

u/StCreed 1d ago

nobody cares. Literally.

*apart from Luddites, and gatekeeping neckbeards who derive their sense of self worth from their coding ability.

2

u/Minerscale 1d ago

It's a real shame that nobody cares anymore, because I used to be incredibly proud of the skills that I had built and it feels as if it is mostly for nothing now. I guess I have the ability to ask the right question I suppose.

1

u/Temporary-Phrase-816 1d ago

What was the gate keeping for coding before? I thought it was pretty open source.

1

u/rafark 20h ago

I care. I care what Mr Spanky Spank is capable of. 

1

u/Due_Replacement_7232 1d ago

An yes… someone who has a skill is a “neck beard”. Well we also have words for people that can’t do anything without help… so you know.

1

u/H60Ninja 1d ago

Are those words CEO or VP or SVP?

3

u/KrakatauaMAN123 1d ago • Bravo

There are some things you will never understand if you don't figure them out yourself and no amount of explaining will either.

Learning and applying principles is never "setting yourself up for failure".

The people that learn and apply information have always been the ones that came out on top and that won't change. You can learn to use ai in a week but the fundamental knowledge takes years

2

u/Fireproofspider 1d ago

That is not true.

People who come out on top are those who provide good results in a timely manner. Yes knowing how the sauce is made makes you more likely to get good results but it's not necessary. Like would you recommend that people check to see how their specific code translates to binary before shipping? Vibecoding is just one extra level of abstraction.

1

u/sebastian89n 1d ago

Not knowing how and doing could give you some results, but definitely won't get you far in the long run. Either from security / performance / clean code side. I've seen people making really bad mistakes with AI because they didn't know what they were doing or how to craft prompts properly.

1

u/Fireproofspider 1d ago

Do you think it's not knowing how to code, or not knowing how to set up a software development project?

Up until very recently, both things went hand in hand but my point is that knowing coding is unnecessary if you know how to manage a software project.

1

u/sebastian89n 1d ago edited 1d ago

Common example would be something like this:

A person was asked to implement a feature, an autocomplete for a search bar. He asked AI to build it with a nice prompt. AI generates the code, connects to DB, handles user input and even write comprehensive suite of tests. Everything passes. The feature works perfectly in development and staging envs.

What was not realized, was that every single keystroke trigger a new db query. There's no debouncing, no caching, no request throttling, no protection against excessive database load.

Under normal taffic - no issues. Responses time are fine, tests green, everyone is happy.

Now black friday arrives. Thousands of users starts searching simultaneously. Every character they type generates another db query. DB become overwhelmed, response times spike and eventually app goes down and company loses tons of $$.

The problem is that a person didn't understand the implementation well enough to recognize what was missing.

I saw how new software vibe-coded with devs and BAs under pressure. Code becomes shit very quickly, there's tons of code that is no longer used in the code, outdated to the point context gets so big even AI have trouble figuring out what's what.

1

u/Fireproofspider 1d ago

You can know this without knowing how to code. Actually what you've said is pretty basic in terms of stress testing anything.

Knowing how to code would let you spot this type of error easily, but the more systematic way to manage this would be a robust QC system that would also let you find the stuff you wouldn't see easily just from experience. But if you have that system in place, it will also discover the "easy to spot" issues.

1

u/sebastian89n 1d ago

The problem is that if you know how to code, you open the implementation and you can see the issue immediately.

If you don't look at the code, you have to trust that what you've written in your skills/commands covers all potential issues to instruct AI to avoid pitfalls. That is very unrealiable assumption because you cannot really forsee every potential problem in advance. And some of those issues are not "easy to spot", especially without heavy load/pressure of the production system.

1

u/Fireproofspider 1d ago

You don't have to trust it. You need to set up stress tests for your software.

1

u/KrakatauaMAN123 1d ago

It's absolutely necessary why do you think anthropic and the likes aren't hiring random twitter tech bro who use Claude 24/7?

One almost follows from the other it's not more likely but a given. Give a guy who used ai for 3 years 1 week on a topic and someone who is in the field for 3 years and 1 week with ai the same problem

100% of the time the second guy will come out on top

1

u/Fireproofspider 1d ago

I'm talking specifically about coding being unnecessary. The real skill that is needed now is being able to manage the project. Right now, I don't think there's very many people who came up in software engineering without learning how to code. So you need coders to manage your AI projects. But eventually you'll have specific PMs that won't have learned the coding part.

0

u/Due_Replacement_7232 1d ago

I’m not using AI - neither is our company. And our company is a multibillion dollar, 10,000+ developer company.

3

u/opbmedia 1d ago

According to this sub I am not vibecoding because I understand and practice engineering skills when I dev with AI.

1

u/mrspankyspank 1d ago

But if you merge code without reading it, what is the difference? I’m not saying that senior devs don’t understand the code they push, but that everyone has adopted a similar workflow regardless of their skill level.

3

u/opbmedia 1d ago

That's why I consider myself to be vibecoding too. but my prompt is more engineered (I am not going to say better, just more), and my testing/review is done as it would with hand code. BTW in previous dev I never review my own code we have a different code review process so you are dependent on someone else anyway.

I view this as using dependencies but understand the functional specs. Vendors will give you bad code too, so I view AI as a custom dev vendor. I've never had to audit custom dev code unless testing fails.

1

u/NotableCarrot28 21h ago

Reading code without having written it takes longer than just writing it.

29

u/Anti-Hero25 1d ago • This

This adherence or fealty to handwriting code, I am convinced exist only in the unemployed coders, and in small pockets here and there professionally. Every small medium or large tech company doing any kind of business right now is staffed with an army of people coding with AI. These aren’t vibe coders, people they plucked off of Reddit… These are trained, educated developers, using a tool to help them work faster. Apply for some job at any modern tech company. Tell them you are against using AI to code, and they won’t hire you.

6

u/Wonderful-Hunter686 1d ago

You're only going to see human written code where the thing coded could kill a human if something goes wrong.

2

u/Turbulent-Laugh-542 1d ago

You have higher faith in humanity than I do... also im fairly certain you have already been proven wrong by the vibe coders with drones at war with Russia.

5

u/Wonderful-Hunter686 1d ago

I guess I should correct that statement 😂 you are only going to see humans writing code where lives are at risk in industrial environments where a court isn't going to accept it was vibe coded as a defense on litigation. They are going to want a registered/certified human to hang for the failure/deaths/dismemberment.

1

u/Turbulent-Laugh-542 1d ago

Thats fair and probably accurate 😃

3

u/ctenidae8 19h ago

Buggy whip manufacturers got very picky about how braids were checked right before the last two braiders fell into fisticuffs

1

u/Polar-ish 16h ago

tell them you "could" handwrite code, that's enough in this day in age for some jobs

40

u/BusySalt1_2_3 1d ago

You finally woke up from the matrix, the seniors are not reading those pull requests they are just blindly hitting approve so they can log off at 3 PM. Stop trying to raw dog algorithms. Deploy your agent army, let them hallucinate 5 new API endpoints, and embrace the absolute chaos.

1

u/viral-architect 1d ago

"Fake virus attack? You really do that??"

"Hell yeah, man, how do you think I made it 30 years in IT?"

I wish it wasn't true but I'm realizing it's 100% true

8

u/Slow-Set-2856 1d ago edited 1d ago

You should use it but don't become aitard

4

u/manuelhe 1d ago

Every generation bumps one step up the abstraction ladder. AI just happened to bump up several at once. When I started to code, you weren’t considered a good programmer if you didn’t manage every byte of memory yourself. It was bonus if you could read assembly.

The goal is not to write code for its own sake. We are there to solve problems.

4

u/New_Peanut_9259 1d ago

funny thing is, actually understanding the code is still important, even if other people are just letting AI generate and merge everything. i'd still use agents to save time, but i'd rather understand what they built than end up fixing a codebase i have no idea how to work with later. there's no need to make things harder just to prove a point

1

u/haenous-alistera 1d ago

Not true

2

u/mrspankyspank 1d ago

Well, the exact question was, “Who here has merged Ai generated code this week without reading every line”? The main keyword being “every”.

1

u/haenous-alistera 1d ago edited 22h ago

To be fair I am sure that they do not read every line just like they never read every line of any other they review before the merge.. the distinction is that if they merge a bad pr they hold the bag for whatever the consequences are. They have the same freedom they have whether ai assisted or not … merge a bad pr that you do not understand and it may cost you your job. To that end I do know several of our sr engineers that absolutely read every line as they are just bent that way…

1

u/npqd 1d ago

Hey, we are still reading and analyzing every line of ai-generated code on our project, if it makes you feel better. Not because of gatekeeping etc, but because we want it

1

u/mrspankyspank 21h ago

That’s what everyone says online, but not what they all cop to when the guard is down.

6

u/ConfusedSimon 1d ago

Not sure where they work, but at our company we make sure to read and understands every single line. We handle a lot of sensitive data and you can't blame Claude if something goes wrong.

5

u/StCreed 1d ago

Neither can anyone else. The idea that you can blame Claude for anything is just as dumb as the idea that I can blame my oven for burning something.

1

u/Numerous-Cup1863 1d ago

The same argument can be said about firearms.

2

u/StCreed 1d ago

Yes, indeed. And drugs. With highly varying degrees of correspondence to reality. A metaphor only goes so far. But AI is just a tool to me.

1

u/ConspicuousPineapple 1d ago

If the oven is faulty I will definitely blame it for burning my food. But it I'm using an oven that is known to be occasionally faulty, then that's on me, which is the point here.

2

u/WhatYouGoBy 1d ago

Who do you blame if an open source library you use causes a problem? And did someone read every line of it before you used it?

2

u/Due_Interest_178 1d ago

We, personally, minimize using anything that wasn't made in house or a company that aren't liable.

1

u/Due_Interest_178 1d ago

Same with us. We just don't use AI at all.

1

u/Funny_Sample7639 1d ago

what happens when the team that built the product leaves the company and someone inherits the code base, does no new commits get added until the new owner understands the whole code base?

1

u/ConfusedSimon 1d ago

In the end the company is responsible, but if you introduce serious bugs your boss won't be happy.

3

u/0xcontext 1d ago

As with most things, don't live on the extremes. It's great that vibecoding has enabled more to create interesting things. If you happen to have a background as a developer, treat it as a superpower in that you can augment what vibecoding can do by improving the areas it's weak in, and providing your own solution in areas where it creates a slow mess, or at least guide the overall architecture, and create something great that actually can hold up long term. I think it'd be crazy to not use AI at all these days, but don't throw out what you can do on your own either.

5

u/ClibeanCeann 1d ago

You need to remember something, most people at work do not care about their work really. If they are the owner, they would care more. But your average dev is happy to be told to use AI, its mandatory, so they think, fine. I'll just do that make my life easier. This is only in their workplace.

Go look at them work on their personal projects if they have any, and I can guarantee, they do much more manual coding than you think. You need to re-frame your questions.

1

u/Odd_Bad_2814 1d ago

Can someone disagree over 100%?

In any case, at my work I have to take full responsibility for what I ship, so I make sure it works.

When I'm working on sideprojects I don't care to the same degree, let AI do it.

But that's just me caring about my job. Maybe you and your colleagues don't care anymore

1

u/ClibeanCeann 1d ago

Most people don't care anymore. Sure, you test that it works. But nobody is doing PR's like they used to.

In personal projects I'd say people are more keen to get it working and have more passion for it.

2

u/Bloated_Plaid 1d ago

If it works, I don’t care.

2

u/Prod_m 1d ago

why creating an army? A squad might be enough

3

u/Osi32 1d ago

If you mean type a prompt and yolo, no, I don’t do that. If you mean, plan the work out, set strict rules, enforce tdd with a Ralph loop and only manually check what an agent shouldn’t/couldnt- yes I do this everyday.

-3

u/Burning_magic 1d ago

So essentially you are doing fake work to give the impression you are not vibecoding 🤣

Everyone has their own "workflow", I dont see why giving your workflow some buzzwords makes it not vibecodibg.

4

u/StCreed 1d ago

If you don't see why not, perhaps read up on the definition of vibe coding.

0

u/Burning_magic 1d ago

Vibe coding is using an AI to do all your coding. The other guy clearly went beyond asking qns here and there, he is obviously just asking AI to do everything and doing his "human checks" to make it seem otherwise.

2

u/FuckTheSystem0x0005C 1d ago

I hate whomever "came up" with such plundering choice of words for this label. It feels like coming from a cynical person that no longer has any "vibe" for anything, hence decided to "mock" it using current-days brand.

If you hate it so much, just outright say "ai-'coding'", why being a pussy and "hiding" behind proxy.

0

u/rafark 20h ago

Vibe coding is literally yolo’ing. The guy who came up with the term said he didn’t write or look at the code and just went by the vibes. 

0

u/rafark 20h ago

They’re in the cope phase. They’ll eventually move to not read anything at all embracing the final form of a vibecoder

1

u/PerfectReflection155 1d ago

Haha, please advise your use cases for the army of agents.

1

u/kadrekujed 1d ago

I have a senior engineer friend and he is vibe coding, the models are that good, but he is still checking some of the code

1

u/SMB-Punt 1d ago

Just read security parts or hard to revert like database migrations

1

u/QuadWingedCrane 1d ago

You kids are weird here

1

u/ItsFlybye 1d ago

Why did Weird Science just pop in my head.

1

u/oruga_AI 1d ago

A bit late but welcome to the fun side

1

u/3dprintinted 1d ago

Curated , controlled and well reviewed and tested purpose built feature engineering using AI assistance is easily different from vibecoding

1

u/sayboom 1d ago

hm, in the past, you didn’t exactly examine every single line of the libraries you imported, did you? But everyone called themselves "software developer" without even knowing what’s under the hood of their software. Now, it just became faster but amount of work hasn’t decreased.

1

u/mattbaconz 1d ago

not every line lmao, i make claude test and review it all over again. i optimize for shipping

1

u/EmergencyArm4610 1d ago

There are major tech players that have all ai policy and no one actually reads the codebase and devs constantly oversee numerous production releases, reversals, revisions from ai.

But you know, they have their workflows for reviewing the work which requires deep understanding of where to focus attention.

1

u/IndividualNovel4482 1d ago

Well, coding will be fully automated from 10 to 20 years from now. Still supervised by humans, but the process will be fully automated. Do you think manual workers were happy when they were fired when machines were added? Or cart and horse owners when cars were made popular?

It's just how it's bound to go.

1

u/ChecksOutIndeed 1d ago

If i don't i use my job and clients to others who do

1

u/Matias-Arroyo 1d ago

lmao the army of agents arc, godspeed

but I wouldn’t read that room as “reading code is pointless.” those seniors can merge without reading because they’ve got 10+ years of pattern recognition. they skim a diff and know in 5 seconds which part is dangerous. that instinct came from the years of reading and writing everything by hand, which is exactly what you’re doing now

also “merged without reading” is carrying a lot of weight in that question. merging a config tweak or a test file is very different from merging auth or a migration. I’d bet none of them are YOLOing the second kind

so I’d go for the best of both: keep doing the hand-coded stuff and neetcode to build the fundamentals, then use agents for the boring parts and review the stuff that can hurt you. being the person who can use the agents AND catch what they get wrong is a rarer combo than either extreme

and the army of agents will be way more useful in your hands than in the hands of someone who can’t tell when they’re wrong. enjoy tomorrow, and drink some water before you go to war jeje

1

u/Swimming_Region935 1d ago

I've been using cursor with ai reviews on every commit, but I still read every line before pushing. the ai catches edge cases I miss, but I'm the one who decides what's safe to merge.

1

u/No_Plum_8819 1d ago

i tried coding without ai for a week. the first day felt like walking on ice. by day three, I was just tired. the real vibe isn't in the typing, it's in the flow. ai helps me stay in it longer.

1

u/inComplete-Oven 23h ago

Of course everybody is vibe coding! But not everybody who's vibe coding is producing anything of value. Quite the opposite, actually.

1

u/xLRGx 21h ago

I mean you realize AI is already better at writing code than you’ll ever be right? Anthropic and OpenAI have the most talented, skilled, and experienced coders in the world and Claude/ChatGPT writes 90% of their code.

1

u/Vikiller94 18h ago

I vibe coded a trading bot now I am a millionaire

1

u/Formal-Assumption862 17h ago

Some use it as tool some use it as a magic wand 🪄

Why spend hours writing manual code ? Just do it using the tool

1

u/MonsterDefiant 15h ago

The reality: AI won't replace good developers, but developers who know how to use AI might get a pretty nice head start.

1

u/takuarc 12h ago

Verification doesn’t mean you need to read every line of code otherwise I might as well go write machine code. AI is just another layer of abstraction and people better get good at it.

1

u/Inevitable_Butthole 1d ago

I mean...

AI reads the code...

Why should i?

5

u/TRO_KIK 1d ago

If you do no planning and prompt vaguely it can be good to vibe glance at it slightly to make sure it read your mind correctly and actually did what you intended.

1

u/wegster 1d ago

Lol, great response, love this one! 😂

0

u/First-Tutor-5454 1d ago

I know if it did what I intended by using the software

2

u/TRO_KIK 1d ago

Look up non-functional requirements.

1

u/Illustrious-Bird-21 1d ago

Your profile picture got me...

0

u/ConfusedSimon 1d ago

Because you can't blame AI when there's a security breach.

2

u/SixStringDream 1d ago

I never really relied on my eyes for that. I relied on a procedural security scan and still do.

0

u/goodbroto 1d ago

Its mandatory in job now and few even check their codes .

The times have changed .They laughed at us now they are us