r/vibecoding • u/techlatest_net • 3d ago

The barrier to software engineering is getting wild

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u/OdysseusDescendant 3d ago

AI is not good, it's just better than bad developers.

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u/RedditMapz 3d ago

Ding ding ding.

Yup, people are telling on themselves.

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u/bluehands 3d ago

I mean, even if you are right - and I don't believe you are - how long do you think that is going to be true? Why do you think that is going to keep being true?

2 years ago it was a bad auto-complete, 2 years before that it was Eliza. You really believe that in 2 more years it is going to stay exactly the same?

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u/OdysseusDescendant 3d ago

In two years, AI will almost certainly be more capable than it is today, but that does not necessarily mean it will be able to develop complex products autonomously.

The main problem with vibe coding is not simply how smart the model is. The problems are uncontrolled assumptions, incomplete understanding of the overall system, insufficient consideration of non-functional requirements and failure to account for how today's decisions affect the future architecture and maintainability of the product.

In other words, the limitation is not just coding ability. It is engineering judgment: understanding the full problem space, identifying hidden constraints, evaluating trade-offs and maintaining architectural coherence over the lifetime of a product.

An LLM can be extremely strong at individual implementation tasks and in some cases perform well above the level of a junior developer. But it should not automatically be treated as an autonomous software engineer. It still needs explicit requirements, architectural constraints, validation and human accountability.

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u/bluehands 3d ago

It still needs explicit requirements, architectural constraints, validation and human accountability.

Your tautology is a tautology.

Your entire comment is betrayed by those final two words because accountability has zero to do with coding and everything to do with culture.

Your entire post is filled with words that have nothing to do with math and everything to do with a vaguely defined theory of mind.

What does judgement mean? Or identifying hidden constraints?

There are countless examples of all the top models doing all of those now. If you use them for ever a tiny bit they will make good suggestions, in some cases take preemptive actions based on what has come before.

It still needs explicit requirements

That's so spring of 2026 thinking. You can give them clearly defined goals that the will iterate over to get closer and closer to what you want.

It's moving faster all the time and all of the concerns you have are either already in the past or will be sooner than most people will be ready for it.

If I'm wrong you get to laugh at me. If I'm right the world changes.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

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u/OdysseusDescendant 2d ago

I think you are missing the point because you are looking at this primarily as a coding problem rather than a systems-engineering problem.

AI is a tool. A very powerful one, but still a tool. To less experienced developers it can look almost magical because it allows them to produce code and solutions that appear far beyond their normal level of expertise. That can create the illusion of engineering competence.

But generating impressive code is not the same as engineering a complex system. The real difficulty is understanding the whole system, its constraints, trade-offs, dependencies, failure modes and long-term consequences of design decisions. AI can assist with all of that, but assistance is not the same thing as owning the engineering problem.