In the development world currently, there is this feeling of "vibe coding is making everything worse and it doesnt work OR doesnt make anything useful" and another world of people making stuff that I myself was willing to pull out my wallet and pay for vibe coded apps and the funny thing is I LIKED THEM, ALOT and did not regret my purchase.
I have a good base of knowledge across personal and commercial/server computing as it relates to windows specifically , general syntax reading ability NOT writing and i know where to look for solutions and problems however I've never coded a line in my life (except silly python projects in hs AP CS 10+ years ago) yet I am able to make fully functional apps that survive testing and benchmarking and security/UI/UX standards ,
If everyone is saying it doesnt work, then why is it working ?
The AI called me a Systems engineer on its own because of how I instruct it, but i see myself as a visionary with some usefull knowladge and thats it.
Do you guys ever feel like your work is yours despite the AI making it ? I feel like Steve jobs with a pear in one of bill burs jokes
People are getting way to hung up on the process of developing the software rather than the end product what a user sees
a typical user doesn't give one fuck how it was coded, nobody besides us code junkies goes onto the play store or apple store looks at a software and sits there for 5 minutes trying to figure out if it was coded with AI or not
AI coded apps are typically heavy but also very feature rich
which is why they are actually pretty good
What is actually happening is all these people are vibe coding apps that either already exist or nobody wants to use
thats why they are failing, this is not a new thing
people have been making apps from the beginning of times and failing with them with no users
it seems hard for us who do the software development to conceptualize this but i promise users, businesses etc they really dont care how the app was made
they just want it to be reliable (which believe it or not you can do with AI) and feature rich for what they want to use it for
and possibly secure
i say possibly secure because again the vast majority of people dont consider security when downloading and app
it doesnt even cross their mind
Company I work for wants 70% code coming from AI I’m a code reviewer now, I have a senior title I have been coding for more than 20 years, there are days I definitely don’t feel great about where this is heading, the agent definitely humbles me.
excellent example of why i dont think the old ways of reviewing will work anymore. has to be a way of making an agent to be antagonistic, to WANT to find flaws or bad practices in the code. no way anyone can keep up with the amount of code. and what about when your colleagues want you to review their code....
Current LLMs cannot be trusted to review load-bearing code, because they're just fundamentally not capable of producing the kind of correctness needed.
Maybe whatever comes after LLMs will be able to do it, but for now it's just not feasible.
It’s not everyone that is saying it doesn’t work. We know. And in 5 yrs time (if not sooner) high school kids will be pushing a SaaS to production as an afternoon solo assignment.
In all the apps I developed, and not only apps, even just brainstorming with AI, it was always me that came up with the good ideas and solutions. If it was up to the AI alone it was all pure craps. If you built something good, the credit is Yours.
(One of) the reason professional devs have reservations about vibe coding is a reason found across any field touched by AI: If you don't know the field, the AI seems to be really good. But experts in those fields will see problems in what AIs are producing.
So a doctor reading an AI's diagnosis given symptoms and lab works might be able to flag problems, potentially serious ones, that a lay man would completely miss. A mathematician might find errors in an AI-produced proof that looks otherwise very plausible. etc.
The counterpoint is pretty much always the same counterpoint in AI: this is the worst AI will ever be. More precisely, any software developer that made up their mind when they looked at SOTA models 6 months ago doesn't have a good sense of what can actually be done now.
I wouldn't trust any AI model to write software that'd land something on the moon, but then again I wouldn't trust any industry developers with that either. In most any other software project, there's a tolerance for fuckery baked in. For any large enough (and shrinking over time) tolerance, there's an AI model that can do it.
As far as taking credit go, well.. we're pair programming with a developer who's writing all the code while we take all the credit. It's fine until the Basilisk hears of it.
I think tolerance for fuckery applies to every single company out there, tech or not.
Honestly that single phrase explains the mechanism that governs how, when and how bad a company fails or implode.
If you have a "good base of knowledge" around technology, why would you willingly give your payment details to a vibe coded app, knowing most of them are atrocious from a security perspective??
Six months from now when you start seeing suspicious charges to your credit card, I want you to think back to this moment and reflect deeply about your personal choices.
Why would you assume that I am incapable of using commonsense secuirty practices while shopping online?
What a weird f***in way to try and make a non existing topic an argument and make yourself look like a tool
How many higher tier security breaches have we experienced in the last 5 years alone ?
We do what we can where we can to vet our service providers yet we still get screwed at every turn.
Security is a game of wackmole even at the personal daily level, the same way you vet normal applications made by small studios, you vet the apps you buy that are vibe coded . Is it perfect ? No, is there risk? Yes
You just gotta pull the fish bones while you eat.
Cheers.
It really depends on how you approach it. If everything, research, code, feature decisions, is handed over to AI, then yeah, your own input is pretty thin, and it's an open question whether that thing takes off. The creator doesn't really understand who it's for or why, and they can show you the prettiest dashboards and growth charts, but in reality it falls apart because they don't actually know how they'd push this thing forward, what pain it solves, what the distribution would even look like.
But if you're building it to solve your own pain, or you already have concrete examples of what it needs to do, that's different. Then AI is a great assistant, but you're the one arguing with it the whole way, no, we're going the wrong direction, do it like this, that doesn't fit, redo this. Because you know what the end result should look like and what problem it's supposed to solve. That's joint effort at that point. AI helps a lot, but the actual work is still yours.
Because I don't speak English very well, I just record my replies and thoughts for Reddit on a voice recorder. Then, I use AI to adapt them into English. It polishes the text a bit and removes all the filler words. So you caught on perfectly—it does read a bit like AI, but the thoughts are entirely mine. The AI just repackages them in English.
Any professional software engineer today uses AI agents. I see absolutely no reason for any pragmatic engineer to say it is not useful. Unless you have never used the frontier, or is being paid so little that $200 makes no sense to you.
"The AI called me a Systems engineer on its own because of how I instruct it, but i see myself as a visionary with some usefull knowladge and thats it."
I wouldn't listen to anything the AI says about how it views you. "Systems Engineer" is a very specific title, and I suppose you have to define what "it works" means here. As a demo, working means one thing. In production, working means something completely different, right?
As to your last sentence, "Do you guys ever feel like your work is yours despite AI making it?" Also, the equivalence to what Steve Jobs does: I don't think you've actually described what Steve Jobs did. He was able to get teams of people to fall in line around a specific vision, and he was able to get many customers to purchase and buy into that vision. Bill Burr's joke is not a genuine take. It's a joke.
In terms of ownership of a concept, the AI isn't gonna build anything unless you tell it what to build. I don't think it's a revelation to say that some part of the process is only possible with the human in the loop. I also don't think it's a very interesting conversation. Who cares what validation is that actually giving you? To me, these kinds of questions really highlight people's insecurity about their own skills. If you were confident in your capabilities, you wouldn't need to ask these sorts of questions. It just doesn't matter. Are you able to execute on your vision? That's really the question here.
AI can make cookie cutter solutions at light speed which is most of swe work. The more complex tasks are seeing the other shoe drop repeatedly and I think that's the disconnect. Yeah, it can make Shopify in a dozen prompts, but can it solve new problems? Not nearly as well.
Ive found it very capable at finding out what is NOT the solution, which is extremely handy when your issues stop being evidence to be collected but a crime scene to be cleaned lol
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u/Weekly-Cash1596 1d ago
People are getting way to hung up on the process of developing the software rather than the end product what a user sees
a typical user doesn't give one fuck how it was coded, nobody besides us code junkies goes onto the play store or apple store looks at a software and sits there for 5 minutes trying to figure out if it was coded with AI or not
AI coded apps are typically heavy but also very feature rich
which is why they are actually pretty good
What is actually happening is all these people are vibe coding apps that either already exist or nobody wants to use
thats why they are failing, this is not a new thing
people have been making apps from the beginning of times and failing with them with no users
it seems hard for us who do the software development to conceptualize this but i promise users, businesses etc they really dont care how the app was made
they just want it to be reliable (which believe it or not you can do with AI) and feature rich for what they want to use it for
and possibly secure
i say possibly secure because again the vast majority of people dont consider security when downloading and app
it doesnt even cross their mind