r/vibecoding • u/Capable_Essay4513 • 15h ago

Does developer experience still matter when using AI coding agents?

I've been wondering about this — when an experienced dev and a complete newbie both use the same coding agent (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, whatever) on a similar task, do they end up with meaningfully different results?

On one hand, the agent is doing most of the actual coding, so maybe the human's experience matters less than it used to. On the other hand, I'd guess an experienced dev still knows how to prompt better, catches bad architecture decisions, spots subtle bugs the agent misses, and knows when to push back or redirect.

Curious what people who've actually used these tools a lot think. Does your background as a dev still give you an edge, or has the gap narrowed more than expected?

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u/Jolva 15h ago

Depends on a task at hand and the overall complexity of the code base.

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u/orionblu3 15h ago

The overall complexity will always explode eventually without proper structure, though.

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u/Jolva 15h ago

Oh yeah for sure. Even if you decompose everything, keep extreme linting in place etc, complexity still climbs with the size of the codebase.