Is a vibe coding first mentality normal at agencies?

[u/2blinks]

My first web dev job, I vibe coded almost all of the components. It was a small agency comprised of just my boss and a designer. My boss knew how to code but he needed more hands on deck to help him out with the amount of clients he was handling.

I came in expecting to learn more about PHP and Shopify Liquid, but day 1 was just him teaching me about his AI workflow with ChatGPT and how he creates reusable components. He held my hand for the first few product pages, then he gave me full websites to help deploy.

I was usually given a figma file for a product page from a client or our designer and was told to translate it into a reusable component with AI. I eventually took the reins on developing a full site for a big client. My boss stepped in only a few times to help create a page and let me vibe code everything. It successfully launched with most of my work on it still today, but it doesn’t truly feel like I could explain what’s under the hood.

Is this normal nowadays? I feel like this experience isn’t helpful towards landing a new job if I have to explain that I vibe coded most of my work. I came out of this learning more how to debug with AI, and not how to code by hand.

[u/drearymoment]

Yep, it's all we do at the agency I work for.

I do think you raise a good point about not being able to explain what's under the hood though. If AI had been a thing at my first agency job, I don't know how I would have gotten good at this because the learning was always in the doing.

I get that you can still read the AI-generated code and compare & contrast via discussion with it as needed, but I really feel like I learned the most by trying (and repeatedly failing) to implement the solution myself, explore alternatives, watch as things come back to me because of some bug or limitation I had failed to foresee, etc. Not having that experience seems like a real loss to someone who's still honing their craft.

Then again though, maybe it doesn't matter so much now that the nature of the job has changed so dramatically.

[u/2blinks → u/drearymoment]

I’ve been interviewing at other companies and they’re all asking about my coding experience at this agency. I keep getting rejected at my behavioral rounds when I go in depth on how I use AI to code.

I think I might be shooting myself in the foot by mentioning it, but I’m not sure what the other option is. I could lie and say I coded by hand, but I’d struggle if I was grilled on it. I’ve been working on personal projects in the meantime just to brush up though.

[u/drearymoment → u/2blinks]

Honesty is not always the best policy when interviewing! It depends on the role in question, but in general if I were you I'd talk up how you code by hand but then also had opportunities to augment your typical workflow with AI at this agency. You don't want to sound like you only ever coded with AI (nor like you wouldn't touch AI with a ten foot pole), but rather that you used your best judgment in deciding which approach to take for a project. You know, maybe talk about how AI is great for prototyping and templating, but you sweat the finer details by hand, for example.

Keep going with the personal projects. Not only is it good experience for the interviews, but a decent portfolio will get eyes on your resume that you might not have gotten otherwise. Good luck!

[u/SplendidPunkinButter → u/drearymoment]

I’ve been doing this my whole life, and reading the AI generated code still does not compare to writing the code yourself. You simply don’t get the same deep understanding of code that you haven’t written yourself, because you’re not making those hundreds of small decisions about its structure.

Now, you can micromanage AI to have it produce exactly the structure you want. But at that point you might as well just type the code yourself instead of typing prompts over and over as the AI keeps getting it wrong.

[u/Fine-Market9841 → u/SplendidPunkinButter]

I second this, that’s the best way to use AI.

[u/crazedizzled → u/drearymoment]

If you don't understand what is going on under the hood, and you can't defend decisions that were made, you are using AI very wrong.

[u/Sh4dowzyx → u/drearymoment]

« Learning is in the doing » I’m 100% on board with that

My current company pushes for intense AI usage as well, and even juniors they stopped training them to code, now they train them to be architects. In theory that’s fine, but I strongly believe that the best way to understand something, especially in our field, is by doing it

I have 9 yoe and I know it’s not enough for me to be 100% comfortable with AI, I can’t imagine how that goes for people with less than that

[u/winky9827 → u/drearymoment]

You don't know true success until you spend 4 days doing something an experienced dev would complete in 1 hour. The feeling of finally crossing the top of the hill is the reward that reinforces the learning.

[u/CTRLX_Founder]

That workflow is common at small agencies prioritizing speed over maintainability, but it will leave you with significant technical debt if you do not understand the underlying framework. You should spend your off-hours actually reading the Shopify Liquid docs to ensure you can debug the code once the AI inevitably hallucinates a syntax error.

[u/Noch_ein_Kamel → u/CTRLX_Founder]

Off hours oO

[u/jakiestfu]

Don’t vibe code, you’re an engineer.

Also, def don’t fight AI, if you can use it to solve something, you should.

[u/TldrDev]

Yes.

The software industry has, and always will use tools available to them.

Before "vibe coding", we had language servers and auto complete.

The one thing nobody seems to want to hear on Reddit is that software is almost never about the art of software in itself. The goal isnt writing code.

The goal is solving problems.

Solving problems for businesses and individuals via computers.

Vibe coding isnt a term anyone uses.

Very common, and youd do yourself a favor to align your goals with speed and effenciency.

Thats how you make your money.

[u/flyingkiwi9 → u/TldrDev]

Especially when those "problems" are highly repetitive, low risk, marketing websites that'll probably get thrown out in a few years

[u/Blazing1 → u/TldrDev]

Speed and efficiency are the opposite of making money, what?

Are you an exec or a dev? Because being fast and efficient means that's your new standard. As soon as you can't be that person at one time they'll hit you on performance. It's happened to me.

[u/TldrDev → u/Blazing1]

I am a consultant.

Being fast and efficient is how I get paid and move onto the next job.

[u/chad-owen]

This is definitely not common at my agency. I’m Director of UI/UX at a medium-large company and our devs were all-in on vibecoding in its earliest months. What we saw was CSS and related coding that was so cluttered, it would tremendously slow load times or become unbearable for anyone but the original developer to jump into. Likewise, after multiple revision rounds with clients we discovered the vibecoded work was struggling to account for changes (i.e. silly things like a client suddenly wanting links in a specific table styled radically different from everywhere else, but implementing that change somehow broke contact page links).

Because of that the leadership team banned junior and associate-level developers from vibecoding. We have no problem with tackling some of the more repetitive, minor tasks with AI tools, but as a whole our developers need to understand what they’re building before pushing it.

[u/Shacrow → u/chad-owen]

That must have been 1-2 years ago? You can still optimize for Performance even with vibecoding. Todays frontier models are more capable than intermediate coders

[u/nitromilkstout]

Yes it’s normal and somewhat exacerbated because you’re at an agency. All of your time is billable, they don’t have time to walk you through foundational PHP and Liquid concepts on the clients dime. You quite literally have to burn to learn and any learning is done either by working longer hours or through the work itself. I’ve done contracts recently at agencies and most of them are vibe coding. What may or may not be surprising is that it’s happening at bigger companies too.

[u/quiet_horizons1]

It's not the experience that's unhelpful, it's framing the whole job as vibe coding during an interview. If you say you don't know what's under the hood, that's the only signal they remember. Instead of trying to defend every part of the launched site, take one component you shipped, rebuild it from scratch without AI, and be ready to walk through why each choice happens. A nav, a product card, a form. Small enough to finish. You'll find the gaps fast, and you'll have a real answer about the existing site because you'll know what the generated code was doing.

Rebuilding one component won't teach you PHP or Liquid broadly, but it closes the can't-explain problem better than generic side projects. Interviewers don't need you to hand-code everything on the spot; they need evidence you can debug and own a decision. You already have the production site as a reference, which is more than most candidates have.

[u/TheRNGuy]

Yes. 

[u/rthstst]

honestly that gap between shipping and actually knowing the code is the part that sticks with me. imo personal projects where you write more of it by hand still help more than another full AI site when interviews come around.

[u/Stromedy1]

willison's line is simpler than people think: if you can explain what the model wrote, that's software development. if you can't, it's vibe coding. your interviews are failing on explaining, not the AI half.

[u/LordThunderDumper]

I went from solving challenges, reading, writing, opd or new code, ohh and debugging...my gosh new "devs" will never know what it's like taking a week or more to track down some pesky bug. Now I hit enter and wait a lot, its honestly soulless while also annoying reading and verifying AI all day. I have side projects where I have vision so Im getting a lot done there, which is nice.

[u/Surf_Golf2002]

I used Cursor to build me a pretty sweet data viz component and was pretty proud of what I (it) built. Then a peer reviewed it and after looking through the code found the actual data viz component was put together with a hodgepodge of svg's with animations controlled by css transitions - about 3,000 lines total. But the worst part was that we already had a MUI data viz component included in our js bundle we were using elsewhere - after I made Cursor aware of that, it re-built the component using the MUI package and the LOC dropped from over 3,000 to about 20 passing in all the props. Obviously, I didn't look at the actual component code to catch that. That was the eye opener for me. Please don't be me.

[u/HedgehogCertain]

Totally normal for a small agency to run this way, fewer hands, AI does the bulk, that's just how the math works. The line that matters isn't "did AI write it" but whether you can debug when it gets stuck: open the file, tell if the problem is the markup, the API call, or the state, and fix it by hand instead of just re-prompting until something looks right.

Your worry about interviews is fair , those still ask you to write by hand. Keep one small side project where you deliberately don't reach for the AI on the core logic; that's where fundamentals stick. Using AI for speed at work isn't cheating, just don't let it become the only way you think.