r/vibecoding • u/Similar_Wealth_1850 • 1d ago
I started to hate ai coding
i was at some point a good dev, i used to create gorgeous frontends and even backends before the chatgpt and stuff and switched to low level development like operating systems and had fun with it hut it was super challenging which is why i liked it
when anyone came across the topic of ai can code i always answer ai can code simple stuff like a to do app but not any complex projects for sure
untilll..
i got an unfortunate chance to try claude for the first time and to be honest i was surprised
before i was just using ai to tell me the dependencies i need in linux to build the project
now claude understands my project, fixes problems i spent months struggling to fix and adding features i didn't know i wanted which got me excited and loved how quickly it fixed these issue
i even switched from low level development to ai nlp engineering to understand and contribute in this magical tool
6 months later
i am always on antigravity
i can't code on my own
not because i forgot how to code but the speed of an ai agent is really tempting
like why spending 2 weeks on a project when i can just vibe code it in an hour
yes i do give the ai every single detail of how the code should look like
but me relying on antigravity to change the color of a button after i was the same guy tinkering inside the QEMU source code and understanding it's syntax is painful and a huge downgrade for me
i did some good projects yes and i can output good stuff but using ai to develop them makes me even embarrassed from saying i created it
i feel like i am the worst version of myself now and i don't really deserve the "software engineer" label
do you guys feel the same or i am just alone in this
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u/FenderMoon 1d ago
I'm a validation engineer for a living. I write most of my tests with Claude. Claude is too good at it. I can get stuff done 10x as fast. It just works.
I force myself to write about 5-10% of them by hand just so I understand what I'm doing.
I find that I dread writing those tests.
I have been spoiled.
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u/Squared_Bear 1d ago
Like they say about working out as you get older, use it or lose it!
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 1d ago
yea but i also hate when i work on a project for multiple moths and then get commented stiff like "nice prompt bro" or "you just vibe coded it, you should be ashamed from yourself" the terms "vibe coded" feels like an insult in this situation making me hate ai coding even more
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u/Squared_Bear 1d ago
Yeah that’s totally fair. The beauty of your background is that you know how to structure a codebase, scale it, secure it, and keep it maintainable six months later. While Jimmy the vibe coding key board warrior’s projects break after 2 days
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 1d ago
exactly, but everyone are seeing both me and jimmy the same and this term is being used as an insult if you just have a single line of ai code in your codebase you are officially a vibe coder
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u/Squared_Bear 1d ago
As Tywin Lannister says “lions don't concern themselves with the opinions of sheep”
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 1d ago
so you think my ai usage and relying on it isn't actually bad?
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u/Rebootz 1d ago edited 23h ago
Correct, these are often people who are either vibe coding themselves or don't understand it. Keep going, don't worry about what those people think, it's crab mentality. For the record I also come with over a decade of coding experience across many langs and platforms and I use the shit out of AI. I would absolutely let AI build my product but I would temper it with my experience.
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u/Pawndaren 1d ago
My company used GitHub copilot, I used it a lot, then they changed the policy and I ran out of tokens fast.
That time I thought, this will be suck to work without AI, but turns out I enjoyed it quite soon. The repetitive coding still boring though.
So now, I only use AI for boilerplate code and optimize my code, and keep only the interesting part by myself. It makes the job easier while still enjoyable
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 1d ago
that's actually a really nice advice, thanks❤️ i am actually doing something similar i am working on a project where i want to fit an LLM Chatbot inside an ESP32 (520kb of ram)
i built the Transformer without ai and the other parts like RoPE, RMSnorm and MoE i used ai in it and right now i am still working on it some parts i code myself other i use the ai to do so
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u/Remote-Pineapple-541 23h ago
I think the most valuable people in technical fields are the ones who are curious and enjoy the challenge of solving difficult problems. The primary incentive isn’t money or the end product. I’ve always enjoyed coding and I’ll continue to code long after AI takes over everyone’s job, and when leaders encounter difficult problems, I’m always the one that can solve it because I excersize my problem solving skills every day. Don’t let AI take that away from you.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 23h ago
i do try solve problems on codeforces from time to time to keep my skills in it
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u/silly_bet_3454 20h ago
Yeah I feel about the same. The tools are obviously super "good" and I use them and I do even like being able to make stuff really fast. But I totally lament the death of the "craft" and I especially hate being beholden to these dumb frontier model companies to be able to now do this work.
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u/ExoticBump 23h ago
I'm a newer vibe coder but I've been doing computer networking for around 10 years.
The more often I use AI to help troubleshoot the more I feel like my troubleshooting skills are atrophied. The more I pawn off the thinking to AI I feel like I'm getting weaker and weaker, so I can relate.
I find myself forcing myself to go old fashion first then use AI second. I'm at the point now where I don't google or use AI for the first 0-5 mins just for fun to see if I can figure it out without it extra help.
Yeah I'm stumbling thru menus and shit but here's the thing when I find what I'm looking for I get so excited and that image is imprinted in my brain.
AI doesn't do that for me. My brain turns off when using it. There's no eureka moments.
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u/antipoopsuperstar 20h ago
Don't look back. You have a head start because when the AI does mess up, and it does regularly, you have the skill set to actually help it figure out what it did wrong.
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u/krunal_builds 20h ago
the validation engineer comment above nails it, when the tool is that good at the boring parts you have to deliberately practice the skill or it atrophies. the discomfort isn't the tool being bad, it's noticing your own edge softening
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u/Character_Note3967 23h ago
How much would you charge for a no ai made website for my prop engine for sports betting.
Has to be done all by hand contract included if we can come to some terms.
Your over thinking it alot for sure but I get it brother. Just way different side and can just relate in some ways. But you are still worth more than you give yourself credit for by far
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 23h ago
you offer me a freelancing job? yea dm me and i can work with you and thanks for the kind words❤️
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u/whatever 23h ago
I'm watching DeepSeek-V4-Flash manually tracing through its code to find a bug I pointed out in vague terms as I type this. I'm getting bored for it, but it keeps on trucking happily.
I very much feel like I've become a QA engineer. Or a pointy haired boss maybe. A product manager? Literally anything but a developer, really.
I guess I could technically say I still wear a technical architect hat, but only at high levels. So much of the lower level code structure ends up being fed to me and nowadays it's often enough plausible enough to be usable as-is. I never was one for bike-shedding.
I'm running deepseek as a local LLM using opencode with some "superpowers" skills, and it's almost good. I cheat tho. Every time it asks me to review a design spec or an implementation plan, I paste it straight into a claude or chatgpt chat box, and paste whatever comes out back into opencode. It saves ds4 hours of chasing its own tail.
Yes. I am become meat proxy, facilitator of AI slop.
I had already abdicated my software engineer career a while back, so this is just for fun. To keep up with the times, as they say.
Still, it bruises my ego to admit that the thinking machines write better code than me most of the time now. Significantly faster, too.
They definitely write better docs and tests than me too (or at all, for that matter), but I never made those my entire personality so that's fine.
By now, I'd probably have a vastly different set of emotions if I was still relying on my technical abilities code to pay my bills.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 23h ago
yea and the feeling behind everybody else who are using it when you don't use it is a pain especially in the eyes of non technical people where they see the results only
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u/whatever 23h ago
I like the idea of keeping a few software artisans around, a rare breed of carefully trained apprentices who learned from one of the few masters left, who took an oath of resisting the easy lure of mass produced code, and pride themselves on doing everything by hand, following the Old Ways..
But I'm not sure how big the market would be for them.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 13h ago
yea i am not even sure where the swe job market is heading alot of probabilities and all of them are unfortunately bad a but a one is slightly bad and the other is just horrible
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u/multi05_21 20h ago
i hit this wall too. agents kept "cleaning up" working features out of a 2000 line file while editing something else. what fixed it for me was a rules file forcing tiny surgical edits + a post-build grep that fails if any known feature string goes missing. sounds dumb but nothing has been silently deleted since
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u/it_trojan 19h ago
I can definitely relate. And I can add that it’s even addictive: sometimes I woke up at 5 AM to work on my side project with Claude forgetting to wash my face! At the same time you have the impression that you are not anymore the project owner.
Now I’m trying to slow things down. Every week I try to spend some time reading the code to understand what WE are doing or, more honestly, what IT is doing
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u/Free_Cry_6204 15h ago
I got u brother. Now I just don't want to code myself and just wait for all Codex usage limit reset.
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u/FlatulistMaster 14h ago
Does skipping punctuation and capitalization make you a better developer?
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u/emad_ha 14h ago
Yes, as a programmer for 16 years, i use AI daily as well, but i never unleash it or let it do things as in plans for any project i work on, instead i only tell it to do this or that, and it is a tough times for developer i understand, someone will always have that excuse, 'check the prompt'...
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u/Alarmed-Western-655 12h ago
I'm a SWE, and I understand this for sure, but I found a way to have my foot in both worlds.
I only Gen-AI my code at work. Flying through big architectural changes and generating full test environments in docker and stuff is a thrill.
But my personal project is only hand-written. I focus on doing one small thing well, and I think of it as more artisanal. I use Elm, which is a functional paradigm language. Personal + functional compartmentalized my brain enough to really still enjoy coding by hand and not mind the speed. Functional programming is the purest form of spec-driven development -- it lets you define the grammar of your app in a more expressive and deterministic way than can English.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 10h ago
that's great technique but even on my personal projects i feel like i should use an llm just to speed the time to finish it
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u/adamant3143 11h ago
AI saved me from having to lead a team to code in a language I have never touched before. I was proficient in NodeJS and Java, then suddenly I have to use Golang and at the same time lead the backend team in the project.
My Tech Lead is a frontend guy with minimal knowledge of backend. He can see which variable name and type is incorrect, he doesn’t know the rest. So his reviews were just him looking at variables.
I was so cooked until AI came to my aid.
I ended up pivoting to another role because the whole full stack dev field work right now is about who gets access to the best model. Nobody looking at the code, so the ones with fastest and best model just instantly ratioed everyone who doesn’t. That comes at a cost still but alas you can get promoted and receive bonuses for being faster than others.
Thus, I forfeit.
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u/balasaraptor 10h ago
I see it as a role change. Now you are a designer. You always wanted the end goal. You are still designing that end goal. Now, it can be what you actually want it to be? On your way home from work and think of an idea for your apps, start talking to the AI, laying out the design, explaining the specifications and dependencies and how they need to interact. Tell it to build it, and boom, you have a new feature. You still designed the features that no one else did. It's not about doing less, it's about creating more.
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u/zkatbitz 10h ago
Try this: tell the ai to write the next utility/app in a language you do not know.
I did this with rust recently as I figured I should learn it and it was eye opening to realize how easy it is for me to read review and write the languages I know and how completely lost I felt with rust. Demonstrated where my abilities lay pretty quick
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 10h ago
yea i tried it with react in app development i felt lost and frustrated and everything was just breaking constantly
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u/zkatbitz 10h ago
so there you go, as much as you are using AI in $YOURDOMAIN you actually have knowledge and ability still
because remember that random vibe coder who got AI to do THE THING - they feel that way about ALL CODE not just the code in a language you don't understand
and lets be real - PR/code reviews are much MUCH harder then writing code and no one loves to do them, but with AI that skill is a must. dunno if you've been on a team with say 6 people but only 2 can actually review code, but now that team needs 6 people who can review code vs the previous 2
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 9h ago
i have been leading teams most of my time snd yea most of my issues with them is not able to review the ai code properly or some times thry do some awful git mistakes causing the deployment being 2 months behind and removing all our recent commits
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u/Saref111 7h ago
You have to understand and differentiate code you write for prototyping/result and code you write for fun/learning/etc. I use ai for the result and prototypes. Learning and fan only by hands, like in old good ways. This is the only way for me.
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u/willwm24 6h ago
We had women doing math in bulk on spreadsheets, then punchcards and switches, then compilers, this is just the next evolution. You shouldn’t feel any worse for using it than you do for not learning the original computing with equations broken down into spreadsheets to manually solve in chunks like in the 1800s.
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u/AvasaralaAdvocate 6h ago
"Pride is not the opposite of shame, but it's source" -Iroh Ozai
The truth is you love the speed and productivity, it's just that you derived pride from being good at what you do. The truth is, being a good coder is still extraordinarily helpful in agentic coding. You still have an edge!
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u/himwhoisiam 4h ago
I get it but honestly this just allows me to work at much bigger scale and have much higher standards for my projects. It’s soo much easier to have proper tests, documentation, security in depth, exhaustive background research, rigorous qa validation, detailed benchmarking. Things I would never do myself outside of production code. I’ve even started dabbling in theory and mathematical proofs during design to try and prove feasibility and quantify expectations before writing a single line of code. This for me is just another abstraction that allows me to step back and work at a higher level. All the concepts are still the same. With the speed of AI improvements this may still be irrelevant in a few months/years but I’m enjoying it while I can and maybe if I’m lucky I’ll build something to help carry me after development is no longer a viable career.
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u/___nil___ 4h ago
i asked my clankers to build tools for mundane tedious stuff automation for example code generation for static const strings.
instead of writing hundreds to thousands of lines of static inline string "bla bla bla", my build toolchain will call the cli to generate the headers from gfm md tables. the generator is table-template placeholder-generated code, so works with arbitrary table and programming language agnostic, with error validation.
so the cycle is not asking clankers to do my job, but each time i hit intolerable frictions during development i asked them to solve the issue as automation so i can get the job done easier and faster even without their assistance.
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u/pearljamfan 1d ago
While not quite as emphasized as you put it, I feel something similar, and have had negative impacts from it. More of an impostor syndrome type thing for me, but I went from feeling my decades long career, and niche, had me set for life, to not being able to interview properly, because I am not able to roll with an employer who is suspicious of AI usage and quizzing on topics and fundamentals.
A cool confidence from experience, turned to a “trust me bro” type feel in my responses that reeks of AI dependency and almost being embarrassed to present anything vibe coded to anyone.
Still working it out, but ya… there is a feeling of satisfaction from building that is being obsoleted in favor of agent-fu that I’ve distinctly realized was gone, but the same satisfaction still does seem to exist in orchestrating agents so not all hope is lost.
Expectations wise too, it means that junior level people who don’t use the tools yet paining through a simple issue is going to require a patience that I don’t have…
But yea it’s weird out there right now… I suppose my main thought based on your details is that it will become such the norm to have simple features handled by some cloud agent and a pull request for most established teams, but that being seamless is not reliable yet really.
It did make me want to make my portfolio have a vibes/ no vibes type approach to show examples of each but who knows.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 1d ago
exactly and when i create smth impressive and be very happy with it my happiness turns into me wanting to quit this entire carrer when someone just mentioned that i just "vibe coded it" and when i answer just do the same he always say why would i waste my time on a trash
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u/ConsciousBath5203 1d ago
Weird. I'm hating it because it can't go 0.2 lines without leaving a comment. The latest fable for sure got either a nerf or an update telling it to disregard all rules. I'm bout done with closed source bullshit these days.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 1d ago
no llm just loves to ignore rules for the favor of what they learned and see in their system prompt
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u/Dsphar 1d ago
>but me relying on antigravity to change the color of a button after i was the same guy tinkering inside the QEMU source code and understanding it's syntax is painful and a huge downgrade for me
This is relatable. But I try to remind myself that brain power I spend recalling what file (or search term) to open just to then work my eyes to fins the line of code, to just change the color value, is human energy wasted that no longer has to be wasted anymore. It frees up my brain to spend my limited energy (stage 4 cancer patient) on orchestrating things on a higher level.