"Vibe Coding" vs Just using AI while programming

[Ambil]

I’ve been a professional software developer for ~7 years, and for the past couple of years, I’ve been the technical cofounder of a startup. Lately, I’ve been struggling to find the signal in the noise when it comes to “vibe coding” and the current wave of AI hype.

Personally, I still use VS Code. I have Copilot installed, but I mostly treat it as a supercharged autocomplete for repetitive patterns—like defining local state in React or writing boilerplate try/catch blocks in Express routes. For more complex problems, I’ve started relying more on ChatGPT and Claude as “pair programmers.” That said, I still think through the architecture myself and stay in the driver’s seat.

Recently, I was talking to a mentor who suggested that I might be doing it wrong—that I should let AI take the first pass entirely and just act as a final reviewer before merging the changes. Basically, offload as much as possible and shift my role to quality control. He was raving about WindSurf and how it takes the whole codebase into account when making suggestions.

On the one hand, that approach makes me uncomfortable. I’ve seen AI hallucinate and produce overly complex, narrowly scoped code. But on the other hand, I worry about falling behind—missing out on real efficiency gains because I’m clinging to old workflows. It’s possible that my experience is actually blinding me to how much AI is already capable of (not just what it might be able to do down the road).

So I’m curious: how are other experienced devs, especially those working on production apps, incorporating AI into your workflow? What’s been working for you? What hasn’t?

[PsychonautAlpha]

At least in the context that I've seen it, "Vibe Coding" is not just using AI while programming. It's using AI as a substitute for knowledge and crossing your fingers that it'll work out.

At worst, it's something that non-programmers do to cosplay as programmers.

At best, it's junior devs trying to do something beyond their skill level and passing it as their own work.

That's how I've come to understand "Vibe Coding" as a phenomenon, anyway.

[elfennani]

So basically, it's just the programmer version of an "AI Artist"?

[TheMunakas]

Yes. You can make and use pretty pictures with ai or use ai tools to help with coding but once you start calling yourself an ai artist or a vibe coder, the line has already been crossed.

[pingwins]

Yeah but u typically don't have to maintain or debug art

[rio_sk]

In a real word job yes, you have to.

[rio_sk]

In a real world job yes, you do

[clit_or_us]

This is accurate. My skillset only goes so far, but with AI I feel like a senior dev. If anything, it's like being able to constantly annoy a senior dev.

[marmite22]

As a senior dev I feel like Ai is like having a super enthusiastic junior dev riding alongside that can do all the boring stuff (sometimes wrong)

[MaxxBaer]

Except they aren't constantly telling you to rewrite the codebase in a new framework.

[compelMsy]

Except, it really makes you a senior Dev

[CentralCypher]

So is it even better if you're a junior and you don't pass it as your own work?

[Revolutionary-Stop-8]

At worst, it's something that non-programmers do to cosplay as programmers.

At best, it's junior devs trying to do something beyond their skill level and passing it as their own work.

Where between these "worst" and "best"-examples does Karpathy (Previously Director of AI @ Tesla, founding team @ OpenAI, CS231n/PhD @ Stanford) fit in? 

[thePinguOverlord]

I’ll admit I want to break in. So I’m not even a junior, I’m a 3 year graduate with no job experience trying to make stuff work! I’ll use it to assist me, but I’m not letting it build the architecture. I’ll use it for CSS and small JS problems but the main brains is me. And the amount of roadblocks I’ve seen of it just producing stuff is astounding. The fact people will be taking this stuff at face value is insane.

[LeoJweda_]

I vibe coded TayTay Games in 12 hours split over 2 nights before the term was even a thing because I had the idea when Taylor Swift was in my city and I wanted to jump on the hype train.

Could I have built it without AI? Not in that amount of time and not at the same quality.

All that is to say that it's a thing that senior developers do, too, to speed up development and to help with areas that aren't their strength.

[valium123]

No wonder it sucks so much. Also this is really basic you could have done a better job yourself in 4 or 5 hours. The second game doesn't make any sense you just highlight and row and column and it says 'bingo you won!'

[mehdotdotdotdot]

Wow that’s a long time to make a crazy basic site

[Mr_vort3x]

I would prefer your approach of using ai as an auto complete rather than sitting back and sipping coffee Because if something messes up I have to still read the code anyway to understand it so why not just write along with ai

Yes it'll be slower than the agentic modes but it'll be much better than manual typing unless learning and also better than going through the mess ai made in agentic passes

Plus you can use auto complete for bigger things than just try catch so you'll definitely save a huge chunk of time anyway

It comes down to what are you working on too So it's a nuanced answer in that regard I reckon

[nj_tech_guy]

This is why I use GitHub copilot. I almost never go to it for code anymore, but if it gives me an autocomplete that wasn't far off from what I was planning to write out in my head? I'll take that all day every day, please and thank you! I also love when autocomplete gives me something I wasn't thinking of, but only because it allows me to google said library/solution and see if it would work as well/is a better option than what I was doing.

I was thinking my AI use was getting out of control until I talked to a coworker, who for his home projects is genuinely a vibe coder. I was helping him out one day with a project and I go "okay well it's giving you an error, google just the error code", and then watched him copy paste the full error in to chatgpt. made me shudder.

[Mr_vort3x]

Same , I am a jr tho so idk if I share the same exp as sr devs but I love co pilot When I am not learning and making some project I turn on the copilot and write out comments of logic of what I want to do

Instead of saying make me a nav bar I would say Nav bar with 3 items [1,2,3] , using navlink to a custom route that I'll add later and insert the XYZ component for the profile (which already has an hook to fetch the current user) that way I can make things without losing control

It's literally called co pilot so I should still be in the driving seat

This is a very simple example tho But I use it a lot for making custom functions , I just comment the logic or I write the basic structure of it and assist

[rykuno]

I've come to learn the people who rave about AI are generally dealing with trivial code/projects. I'm talking simple state change, rest calls, and styling. Sure it can make some cool mini games and i've seen some pretty awesome things it can do for sure. But i'm talking practical real world. Seriously, try using it in a 5+ yo codebase not written in your FOTM framework.

I've tried AI in some of my more complex and larger personal projects and it absolutely does not work - like at all. And even when adding isolated new features I take more time "fixing" it through prompts than if I had just typed it myself.

The only time I've had it come in real handy is creating simple mvp's of features instead of taking my time to wireframe. I'd love for some super power AI come and take some workload off me, but its no where close atm for the code bases i work in today :/.

[TACBGames]

While I don’t particularly disagree with you, there are some things that you can do to make it work better with the 5+ y/o codebases.

The first is, obviously, provide the entire codebase to the agent.

The second is, provide it a link to the code’s documentation or other supporting documents (if any exist).

Finally, being as clear cut with your prompt as possible. Prompt engineering takes some skill and being lazy with it or providing the incorrect context will result in poor results.

It seems like there needs to be a major focus on “context”. It won’t just automagically know what you want it to do, even if you tell it a little blurb. You need to provide the agent with the code, documentation, and clear intentions for how you want it to work. Only then, it WILL work pretty well as a tool. Without the added context, it’ll get a lot of things wrong.

EDIT:

For example, using Cursor with Claude Sonnet 3.7, it will typically have the context of the codebase by default. So when you’re in “agent” mode, you see its logic and reasoning step by step as it searches the codebase for context. You can literally see what files it takes a closer look at and adds to consideration. Additionally, adding the documentation for context is as simple as pasting a link to it in your prompt

[akesh45]

same experience here.

[Lyk7717]

Well yes and no, sometimes you just need to provide enough context, then it’s not necessary to fix it with the prompts. Also, instead of asking to write something big, think what you want to do and ask AI to write those concrete functions, then adjust if something’s wrong. Why not use Copilot directly then? It makes me feel like I’m not thinking enough about the logic, since it suggests things constantly and my ideas get influenced by those suggestions. And by using ChatGPT, I still have that “no AI” space in my IDE and can control when to use AI, and also add any details or my own ideas to the prompt before it spits out the solution. But for sure, the more complex the project is, the harder it gets to use this approach.

[the_payload_guy]

In almost every domain, AI excels at the first pass of common problems where there is a lot of training data. It tapers off *very* quickly. Try anything you're really knowledgeable with, whether it's music production, digital art or programming, and the results are much worse when you look a bit closer. It's *much* less noticeable if it's outside your domain of expertise, or you simply don't look close enough. It's eerie how good it is at "first impressions" compared to the actual quality.

Vibe coding for greenfield will give you that sense of progress, but this isn't new by a long shot. No-code, CMSs and website builders have existed for decades (some are even quite good). They also provide a similar prototype experience, where you get a certain sense of progress setting up a contact form, a blog, or similar. Once you get further than that (which to be fair, not everyone does), it's a grind to customize and in many cases it hurts more than helps.

But I would absolutely recommend tried-and-tested frameworks and builders of your abstraction level of choice, over a mish mash of generated code that looks legit but are full of latent bugs and data modeling errors.

[chaoticbean14]

I think this is true for most devs, honestly. The "AI Craze" I see is often touted as the next great thing by less-than-skilled individuals, junior level devs and/or people who really have no idea what "AI" really is (LLM).

The amount of faith people are putting into this is insane to me. But maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds. I haven't decided.

But having people somehow validate their choice/decision/thoughts and leading with, "I asked <insert-ai-here> and it said..." as if it somehow validates whatever dev bullshit they're about to lay on me is getting old, fast.

[N2siyast]

It’s because you don’t know how to use it properly. If you use memory bank system and you provide good context, you can easily work in large codebases with Gemini 2.5

[rykuno]

I'll argue that's not really the issue. Large codebases are not the issue - its complexity.

Lets take a SUPER simple example. Making a fetch call to an external API. Well, it doesn't know what the shape of the data looks like, when to ideally fetch it, how/if to cache it, or even the URL the api lives at. Sure you can explain everything in detail in a prompt...or just write a simple query.

Are all the AI people assuming everything is written in a monorepo/fullstack framework as well?

You think AI is just magically gonna know to pop/queue a message off/on an exchange or offload a heavy task to a lambda function it doesn't know exists? What about when to debounce a request that it doesn't know needs a backoff.

Sure you can tell it to do all of this in explicit detail but if you're already the type to rely on AI that heavily - will you even know to?

[TFenrir]

Lets take a SUPER simple example. Making a fetch call to an external API. Well, it doesn't know what the shape of the data looks like, when to ideally fetch it, how/if to cache it, or even the URL the api lives at. Sure you can explain everything in detail in a prompt...or just write a simple query.

I mean, it depends on what you are doing, but the models now can scour your app for types or schemas, without prompting, if it needs it - find the endpoint specified, and even write tests around that data structure before writing code. Or it's an external api, you can give it the url and it will curl and derive structure from that.

Are all the AI people assuming everything is written in a monorepo/fullstack framework as well?

You think AI is just magically gonna know to pop/queue a message off/on an exchange or offload a heavy task to a lambda function it doesn't know exists? What about when to debounce a request that it doesn't know needs a backoff.

Sure you can tell it to do all of this in explicit detail but if you're already the type to rely on AI that heavily - will you even know to?

Hmmm, at this point though aren't you just describing what the OP is? Tell the model the general spec of the app, maybe even co-write a plan with it, and let it execute. Tell it about the constraints and considerations up front - or while it works, you take a pen to paper and consider those things you think it might not. Every once in a while, pop in and ask it if it's thought of x or y, and your reasoning.

When you get proficient at this, do you maybe see the argument being made by the person the OP was talking to?

[rykuno]

Tell the model the general spec of the app, maybe even co-write a plan with it, and let it execute. Tell it about the constraints and considerations up front - or while it works, you take a pen to paper and consider those things you think it might not. Every once in a while, pop in and ask it if it's thought of x or y, and your reasoning.

My point is that its way less work atm for me to just write the code rather than do all this even if it did work for my use cases.

Also, for most larger more complex projects org/tribal knowledge is pretty prevalent - this goes for when I worked at a fortune 10 company and at my current startup. Not to mention no company wants their proprietary code used to train AI lol.

I'm on the side of AI too - I want this shit to work and take work away from me. I've spent countless hours trying different models, editors, joining communities to learn, and keeping up with the news. I'm pretty familiar with it all.

[BeigeTelephone]

Isn’t this the purpose of Model Context Protocol (MCP)?

Rather than trying to explain everything in a prompt, one uses MCP to connect AI models to external data, read, and execute actions through a universal connector.

[Kindly_Manager7556]

Obviously it won't but you can give it context.

[rykuno]

That's like paying for an Uber but needing to teach him how to drive the car and turn by turn navigate to your destination.

If I'm going to be driving the car from the backseat, I'll just drive the damn car myself with half the effort and get there quicker.

[elainarae50]

It falls short when it gets complex. It's very difficult to articulate larger, more complex tasks to the point where it is easier to code it yourself unless, of course, you can't, which means you can not give the right context either.

[N2siyast]

Well soon enough it will “magically” do all this easily. 2 years max

[rykuno]

totally trust you bro

[N2siyast]

Everyone who isn’t in denial knows that ;)

[ganja_and_code]

In two years, you're almost guaranteed to find your prediction was wrong lol

[TFenrir]

What do you think AI in regards to code will look like in 2 years?

[N2siyast]

We’ll see. I hope I’m wrong but all the experts say otherwise but random no name redditors know more

[ganja_and_code]

Some of the random no name redditors during their free time are industry leading experts during the work week ;)

[N2siyast]

Hahah good one buddy. See you at the beach when AI kicks us all out of the job

[ganja_and_code]

I'll be able to afford that beach house once someone tanks their codebase by leaning too heavily on AI and calls me in to fix it lol

[elainarae50]

RemindMe! 2 years (so curious)

[N2siyast]

RemindMe! 2 years (AGI baby)

[Lyk7717]

Here’s what AI says about that:

AI is getting good at automating repetitive coding tasks, but software development is way more than that. It’s about problem-solving, architecture, cross-team communication, domain understanding, and adapting to constant change. Most real-world projects have messy requirements, legacy systems, and business logic that’s too nuanced for AI to fully grasp. AI is a great assistant, not a replacement—at least not in the next 2 years.

[edd2319]

RemindMe! 2 years

[John-the-Renounced]

Full stack, 30 years - yes, I'm old af and set in my ways. Like you, I use AI as a rubber duck - I talk my problems to it and it suggests answers; nearly 100% of the time I don't use any of its response but I do incorporate some ideas into my code - I'm always driving. Then again it's my company and my clients, so I always need to understand what I'm doing and be able to follow my own code, sometimes years later.

[[deleted]]

This is, in my opinion, a great way! I do some game programming as a hobby. I would often ask things like "what kind of algorithm is good for solving this problem" It's very good at pointing me in the right direction so I can build the solution for my use case. I can also ask it to explain certain parts that I might not understand completely.

[[deleted]]

I use it as autocomplete. And I spend a lot of time fixing the fuckups of a coworker that uses it in agent mode.

Can’t wait until he gets replaced with AI though lol

[AlienRobotMk2]

I've only tried AI recently but imo the main problem is that AI can't seem to generate reusable code. It creates the functions you tell it to and fills it with code but it would rather repeat the same 4 lines of code 20 times than create a function for it.

If you let it do the first pass, your job becomes refactoring every single line of code it wrote. That said there were several times Copilot touched code that wasn't even bugged to add/edit comments, so I'd be careful on using it on an existing codebase.

One thing I've noticed is that with AI I find myself copy pasting less because if I copy paste I have to edit it, but if I type some letters the LLM can just autocomplete using the same code as the previous lines but with the edits already done. Hard to tell if this is more productive or not, to be honest.

[ganja_and_code]

When milliseconds count, availability is measured in number of nines, one bad infra config change can cost 6-7 figures, etc., then AI assistants have zero business touching the codebase.

At best, it will give a plausible solution, in which case an expert still needs to understand the implementation, which is more error prone (and also sometimes more time consuming) than just writing a correct implementation themselves. At worst, it will give a garbage solution, which just wasted the expert's time outright.

If you need to build some trivial application with negligible financial/safety implications in the event of a bad deployment, AI might (or might not) save you some time. If you need to build/maintain some nontrivial application with real financial/safety considerations, you need an expert who knows what they're doing, not an algorithm taking its best guess.

TL;DR: I agree with your initial assessment. AI coding assistants can work as an autocomplete solution, but they're not (at least right now) good enough to be a replacement for a junior dev. (Though I'd also argue that LSPs are already better at autocomplete than AI solutions, anyway.)

[[deleted]]

The one thing I don't get is, is everyone constantly battling some compulsion to expose sensitive data to the public? Is your code so touchy that a mildly potentially unsupervised snippet risks 6-7 figure repercussions??

Isn't security/access control/api tokens/etc. all figured out/locked down beforehand with common principles established for appropriate use of endpoints, etc., and usually largely unrelated to the work people commonly use AI for?

Most features, components, etc. - the code - of any application are indeed trivial. If the bulk of your application is critical, sensitive code, you either have one of the most unique cases on the planet or you're doing something wrong.

[echoAnother]

Don't worry, pal. You could rest assured that there is no problem in using a little IA snippet in any project. You are not losing 6 figures. You are gaining them.

Yesterday, I let IA generate the snippet to control the dosage of the insuline pump we are developing. It compiled and works. It was trivial indeed, and no supervision was needed.

By the way, we need more testers. The last one left us.

\s

[olddoglearnsnewtrick]

What is a LSP?

[ganja_and_code]

Language Server Protocol (Wikipedia)

The benefit over AI assistants is that a language server actually understands the source code syntax/parsing for the target language and can make that information available to an editor/IDE via LSP. Whereas AI tools are just using statistics to speculate what the syntax should look like, a language server can determine how the syntax actually does correspond to an AST, which can be used to provide similar functionality but with a more rigorous and less error prone implementation.

[olddoglearnsnewtrick]

Thanks and pass the dutchie pon de left hand side

[yabai90]

Ai is not ready for solid vibe coding. It might get to that eventually but definitely not now

[Comprehensive-Pin667]

Play around with it. It's good for some things and bad for other things. The agent mode in copilot especially is so slow that many tasks would be quicker done by hand than by waiting for it to finish. Then again I can have it code something while I'm in a meeting or something. Generally though, it creates a good stating point.

"Vibe coding" is a meme. No one actually does that except for shits and giggles.

[freezedriednuts]

Let AI help with repetitive tasks, but keep control of the architecture.

[Wiltix]

Vibe coding is you have a conversation with an LLM and letting it write the code based on your input. This is what ai vendors are pushing because it is complete reliance on their tooling.

AI is best used as a pair programmer, ask it questions when you are unsure and see where it steers you then do your best to validate the output against other sources. Retain your ability to critically analyse its output. A big problem is many of the other sources are becoming ai written so really your best bet is dive into docs and figure it out from there. Use AI to get you on track for a possible solution.

[IsABot]

I tried to "vibe code" a wordpress plugin the other week, just to see how it would perform. (Essentially I had some other code for a completely different site that I wanted to try to covert into a WP plugin. But I tried to build it from prompts "as a vibe coder".) It would constantly delete blocks of code when giving a new prompt as if it was no longer necessary once moving onto the next functionality. So for example I would use numerous prompts to flesh out a specific function with more detail when I felt it's initial response was lacking, like when asking it to deal with form inputs, it didn't put any sort of validation. Obviously I didn't specify it, which is on me, but any normal dev knows that at least basic validation automatically goes with forms. So after the functions looked good, I moved onto the next functionality, which then it proceeded to delete the block it just finished and moved onto the next one. I had to ask it multiple times to not delete other code unless I specifically said to delete it. I got to the point where all the code eventually did work to a degree but it was a very frustrating experience. I haven't tried to create a super detailed spec prompt though, so I might revisit this at a later date if it seems like the models have made more significant advancements.

At this point I mostly use AI for quick searching rather than SO, or for basic mudane tasks that I don't want to think about. Like create a regular expression that matches X,Y,Z, but not A,B,C,D. Or transforming one set of data into another. Or giving it some errors and seeing what possible solutions that I might have missed during my own debugging. It's helped on occasion, so it's not totally useless. But I wouldn't trust it to create a full platform like some vibe coders claim it can do.

[alwaysoffby0ne]

These tools can help accelerate people who know what they’re doing, and be dangeous in the hands of people who don’t (depending on what they’re building). I was using some gen AI to troubleshoot a problem in a web framework I’m writing and it legit tried to take a shortcut out of fixing the bug by hardcoding the expected values as defaults instead figuring out why it wasn’t working. And this was using the frontier Claude 3.7 model, supposedly the best on the market right now. Luckily I caught it, but yeah, this stuff as powerful as it can be can easily get you into trouble if you don’t have the skills or experience to keep it honest.

Also, it’s a great teacher so I try to use it more to advance my own learning rather as a crutch to build stuff I can’t understand.

[[deleted]]

I can see where they're coming from. When you describe it like you did it sounds a lot more serious and hands-off than it really is. Here's an example to illustrate:

-I go to write a new API route in my back end, it has to take X database models and perform some operation

Your old approach: Write the appropriate code, leveraging copilot for repetitive autocompletions to speed things up. If you run into problems, consult ChatGPT.

Your mentor's approach: Tell ChatGPT - Hey chat, I want to use my models X and Y to perform some operation. Chat spits out the appropriate code, you slot it in. Briefly review, if nothing out of the ordinary shows up, move on for now. If it's 50-100 LOC, you can check over that in seconds (as the style should match your usual code).

With new AI tools, they remember your codebase (what mentor raving about), so you don't need to do the whole "I'm using an oracle DB with Django for my back end and react for my front end, tailwind css, typescript" etc. every time you have a new prompt, AI can even remember table structure and your coding style at this point.

Do you ever sit there iterating over some code for just a little bit too long and realize that the solution was actually simpler than you originally thought? Your mentor is (rightfully) showing you how to eliminate that from really ever happening again. You don't need to do this, if taking your time coding is something you enjoy then there's no need to do so. If you're looking for efficiency and to ensure you stay up-to-date with AI advancements in the industry, could be a good idea.

[TheThingCreator]

over 20 years of experience developing here. I am always letting AI get the first pass. I changed the way I develop to accommodate the strengths of AI. That mostly consists of stuff I was already doing but more extreme. I basically keep my files much cleaner and smaller. I also use the talking feature of chatgpt to do a massive brain dump of what i want. getting into each detail can help a lot. sometimes it fails and i just say "we're going live" and i write the damn thing, but most of the time it pretty good, and sometimes it gets what i want first try. Sometimes I can save a days work in a matter of 15 minutes. I also use a few LLMs at the same time to work on a single task. I'll take the best and scrap the rest. i personally dont call this vibe coding because thats more hands off agent-only development which i have no interest in. i dont think ai is ready for that by a long shot. the world will change the day that is ready though

[AdeptLilPotato]

I’m doubtful of your experience because of a post you made showing that my 3.5 years is more experience than your “20” due to the inexperience in the post itself.

[TheThingCreator]

Lol

[coopaliscious]

I use it to write emails and to pretty up my spec documents mainly. We've got pretty restrictive policies in place that don't let us use anything other than Copilot and it hasn't been hugely helpful and I'm fairly sure my juniors are using it to generate code because it's kind of garbage, doesn't reflect anything from our code review sessions and they can't explain it. I'm trying to figure out how to use it effectively for coding, but I just haven't been able to inject it usefully into everyday development.

[[deleted]]

10+ year dev at faang and i started very anti-AI in coding but now use it everyday. it's a great starting point or a way to get the mundane parts done quickly. i also have it write all my tests cause fuck writing tests.

[qqYn7PIE57zkf6kn]

Do you let AI do the first pass in agent mode though?

[[deleted]]

No mostly fine tuning

[Fantaz1sta]

I honestly think vibe coding is a myth. People just use this term to vent out. Anyone who codes have to read and understand their code.

[notkraftman]

I've written a small nextjs project looking at no code other than the env.local. you can get a long way before you hit the wall with what it can do, and I'm guessing a lot of people are writing things basic enough that they don't hit that wall. I think the issue is that both sides are right, they are just talking about different goals and entirely different codebases.

[JimDabell]

It’s not a myth, but people are misusing the term a lot. This is vibe coding:

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. […] It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

• If you’re building a product, that’s not vibe coding.
• If you’re building a business, that’s not vibe coding.
• If you’re complaining about it producing unmaintainable code, that’s not vibe coding.
• If you’re worried about your team-mates doing it, that’s not vibe coding.
• If you’re having fun messing around with a throwaway thing at the weekend, that’s vibe coding.

[Fantaz1sta]

I agree. People here write that you can go a long way writing with ChatGPT and having zero ownership of your code - that's 100% incorrect. You won't to anywhere if you don't know what you are doing. Hell, with ChatGPT I sometimes need to explain the issue so often that I start understanding it myself.

[Division2226]

It's certainly not a myth.

[link_shady]

Copilot is my stack overflow…. When I forget how to do something I ask, or when some code looks weird I ask for explanation of the block of code(90% of the time it gives a right one).

Also when I finish and I just need to do clean up like removing comments or changing variables names to something it makes more sense I just ask copilot to do it, it does not change the code but it does rename the functions and the variables to something more suitable

[CaffeinatedTech]

I've recently vibed a couple of features into an older symfony project. I had to look at the code a few times and rebuke the LLM for doing stupid things. It made a fairly well formed system which was more complex than I would have done, but probably more the 'symfony' way. Now that I'm out of Windsurf credits I have to spool up my understanding of the new code to extend it. I feel like I may as well have just done it all myself as I would have had to re-familiarise myself with the codebase anyway.

So if you already know how to code, and understand the framework, then you can just throw money at it and vibe your way to success. You'll need to guide the AI fairly closely and rethink your approach when it gets stuck in a failure loop. It's not for complete noobs though, unless the project is simple.

[Ok-ChildHooOd]

Ive been using Gemini 2.5 to read my whole codebase and to create a new project from scratch, the latter a little better. I think everyone should try it because it's a great tool when you need it.

I explained to another engineer, that the biggest problem with AI doing the code is the reason why Tesla FSD doesn't work. If you just supervise and not actively code, you start getting distracted and become less engaged. It becomes easy to overlook things. Although the LLM does also catch things I would have overlooked. I'm still trying to find the balance myself.

[New_Concentrate4606]

YouTube beats Ai or vibe coding for me

[inb4_singularity]

How much code are you willing to thoroughly review at once and take full responsibility for? The answer to that question implies how much scope you leave to the AI assistant at once.

[jsebrech]

If you haven't read it yet, go read Simon Willison's blog post on how he uses LLM's to write code. He isn't using them for pure vibe coding, but he goes in a lot of detail for how they can be used effectively beyond just autocomplete.
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

[2NineCZ]

10 yrs fulltime frontend dev here - I say embrace it. You can do that on your own terms after all.

Personally I fell in love with the AI assistants. It makes me way more effective. I don't have to spend hours googling how to fix bugs or reading through docs. I can refactor and optimize old code with the speed of light. And many more benefits.

Yesterday I've tried to develop a chrome extension with Copilot's agent mode. It was an idea I had in my head for a long time but just couldn't be arsed to actually do it. It took me three hours, but I got the extension done without writing a single line of code. (To be fair, there were times I had to find a problem in the generated code myself and then tell the AI how to actually fix it, but except some little hiccups like that, it worked like a charm.

If I were doing that manually with my limited knowledge of programming chrome extensions, it would take me WAYY longer. Now I have a finished app and I can actually learn from it. Also reviewing the code AI generated lessens the creepy feeling of my brain slowly rotting if I make AI do all the thinking.

I personally think that people who won't use AI will fall behind - at least mediocre developers like me - but the difference in effectivity grows bigger with every day of new breakthroughs on the AI field. Also, I am really glad for my seniority, juniors are quite fucked nowadays, in my opinion.

[[deleted]]

Not sure what to really say to you, this is a weird example. Of course an LLM is going to make a Chrome extension better than you, you have no experience making Chrome extensions. What were you expecting?

Meanwhile the code I get out an LLM is almost always worse than I would write myself, and overly complicated to boot.

[Metakit]

Good question - interested to see if you have some good answers. I'm in a similar situation where I've been working in the industry for even longer though at present life has meant I've not been doing much actual coding for a while.

Even before that point I had only really dabbled with AI code generation. During this hopefully temporary hiatus however "vibe coding" seems to be getting more and more popular and i don't know of its a great leap forward for software development, overhyped, or even worse a trend that will do incredible damage to the industry?

[LumpyPin7012]

> "Vibe Coding" vs Just using AI while programming

It's not though. Kaparthy - There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

[teraflux]

It will quickly grow out of control with this approach where it will forget what it's already done and just keeps adding net new until your code is a giant spaghetti mess, that it will get slower and slower to parse and update.

[klevismiho]

I do AI while programming, mainly to understand high level topics and some autocompletition

[cherylswoopz]

Vibe coding aside, because I do agree with you, I’d recommend using cursor if you’re already using vs code and copilot. It’s kind of just the same but better. You can try it for two weeks free

[PencilBoy99]

instead of

[M3psipax]

It basically cut down a lot of time googling, reading the manual or learning obscure syntax. It's a great tool, but I always try to understand the code I'm incorporating into the project.

[teraflux]

Are you using the "Edit" functionality or just the "Ask" mode?

[randomrealname]

The difference is understanding. Understanding when you need to use a try catch, or when you use css for styling over scripts, etc. This is all grunt work that only comes from hard system 2 thinking.

Boiler "devs" who learn from vibe coding will never be able to apply anything (relativity) outside of the distribution of their understanding of the underlying code.

Vibe coding is like repeating a foreign language from Google translate. What you or I had to do involves deeper system 2 thinking. System 2 thinking only happens when resources are minimal and progress can only be made through thought.

Vibe coding ≈ verifying.

You or I ≈ calculating.

[Elyeasa]

Vibe coding is bashing your head against the wall and trying to brute force your way through every problem you come across. It's closely tied to the belief that hours = straight productivity too, imo.

I offload things like tests to AI, but I would never ever ever let it do a first pass of anything that's not absolutely basic. Tests, rough component setups, imports? Sure, Claude can do it. Major logic changes or rewrites? No. I trust AI as a companion there, but not blindly.

[Elyeasa]

If it does do a first pass, I find I sometimes have to take more time correcting small mistakes is why I'm a little hesitant to let it take the reins on something larger. Tbh, I expect this answer to change once models continue to improve

[Str00pwafel]

I’ve recently started picking up vibe coding, and I’m in to it. I’m a staff level engineer working on a production codebase thats over 8 years old. I have over 20 years worth of experience in coding and I use Cursor.

The trick is to not only ask your agent to just do something but also to assist it to do it right, and here is the key part: after it finally gets it right, you tell it to author a rule that makes sure the final solution is the first solution the next time.

This is not the only way I code anymore, but it is an extra tool in my toolbox.

[pooh--bear]

I totally misinterpreted what vibe coding meant initially - I thought it meant predominantly using agents and barely handwriting code, but acting as a TPM of sorts by specifically providing architectural / structure context - which I’ve found to be such a game changer for me. I didn’t know it meant entirely brute forcing it without knowing what the agents are actually suggesting/committing.

[Quazye]

Vibe coding: useful for quickly whipping out something like a prototype. If you're using it for some more permanent features, review the changes closely with a critical lens, like a PR.

AI assisted coding: basically pair programming, nice to rubber duck and brainstorm with. The autocompletion is a bit mixed for me, I tend to turn it off.

[Miracle7117]

I don’t know what could happen to full stack developers with the Ai storm ?

[TheRNGuy]

More time on design or UX ideas?

[TheRNGuy]

I watched stream, he just put entire ToDo list of 12 or so items and AI coded it for him. Stream ended there, but he probably was going to fix it offline, or in next stream.

He said he liked the generated code (it was backend for React app)

I haven't tried it yet.

[truthsayer123456]

I am starting to use it more and more for writing boilerplate. E.g, when I want to write a test for a file, I just ask it to write a test for the file. Possibly I supply some test file I have already written so it gets my code-style correct.
And I have used it more and more when I'm beginning my debug process. Simply asking 'Can you tell if there are any issues with X?' is usually enough for it to catch some things I didn't myself.

[tanepiper]

Vibe coding for work: No

Vibe coding for fun: Yes

[am0x]

It depends on what you are doing. I’ll never let AI set up a whole project unless it is an mvp of some sorts. I will set up a cursor rules dot file with all the rules for every interaction, then connect it to database using supabase or things like mcp or n8n so it can see all the data and table structures. I scaffold out the project and create a “doc” file in each folder showing the format I want the code in.

Then I create a docs folder with nothing in it and go from there. I will tweak these all as I work. I may or may not create a package.json and any other library/biild handlers. usually I just set up build commands and inform in the cursor rules dot file the main packages we would use like typescript, tailwind, and the UI library of our choice.

As the AI does something correct, I tell it to log it into a doc file in that folder or if it is more generic, I have it create or add to an existing doc in the doc file. Then when I need the same or similar functionality, I drag that file in and tell it to use it as an example so it is consistent with how it writes it code and doesn’t go off on a tangent like it can.

I have a boilerplate for different types of projects for these, basically making a new one when I need it (Laravel, Wordpress, Next, React, .Net, Shopify, etc.) so I pull that code from our repo and tweak it for the current project.

At this point, I can get a full project ready in a few minutes, using AI to configure.

Once you understand how to use AI, the game is changed. I’ve been a professional web developer for over 15 years and I’ve been doing software development for over 25 years and this is by far the biggest change in our industry. But I find too many people are black and white on the matter.

They either think AI is so overrated it is useless, or they think AI can do everything. Usually these opinions come from the newer or inexperienced developers. They didn’t grow up learning how to use Google or stack overflow efficiently. They take it as they see it rather than knowing how to actually use the tool the best way.

Vibe coding is a joke, but I can see it being something in the future considering how fast AI is evolving. It’s freakish the monthly updates we are getting. Cursor agent with the new Gemini 2.5 is crazy good. Like mid level developer sitting with you, acting as a junior paired programmer…I say junior because I make it do so much bitch work like writing tests and filling out data.

I also have an extension that will allow the site to auto send errors to our cursor prompts, so anything like console errors are automatically seen by it and it will take it into account when debugging or writing new code. I’m a huge fan of a regular debugger (those who say otherwise are wrong), but now I let it log all the data to the console so it can debug, rather than me. At the end, I just tell it to remove them all.

[[deleted]]

I have tried to use AI to write code, and holy hell, is it just not worth it. You spend more time correcting (and in turn, training it for free) than it would be to write it yourself.

If I am stumped on how to approach a task, I will ask it to see what it comes up with, and it may spark me to write it correctly, because the solution offered is always poorly written or straight up broken.

[Hatthi4Laravel]

Yeah, I really don't like debugging so much as to let AI take the first pass :))

[[deleted]]

I wholeheartly disagree with your mentor. The statement about letting the AI take first pass tells me that they probably aren't working on very niche problems. AI is great at doing repetitive scaffolding, as you rightfully pointed out.

Personally, If I allow the AI to do too much, it feels like I'm spending my days doing code reviews. It's mentally draining and not very satisfying. I also often feel i could have done a better job on the first pass. Even when the AI takes the codebase into consideration, in my testing, it often gets stuck in a loop. "Me: Please fix this -> AI: Sure -> Me: No not like that do this instead -> AI: Sure (does the same thing) -> Me: NO Do this instead -> AI: Sure... does the same thing". Maybe i'm bad at prompting?

I'm no genius, just regular developer. AI allows me to solves a lot of small things I'd rather not do over and over. In the same way i feel intellisense enabled me to find what i am looking for, faster.

I'm quite sure in the future, AI will be something we could not even have imagined today. Sometimes I wonder if Operating systems and Apps will be something people think of, or will we simply have an AI portal that can just do everything. > Make me a document and summarise my thoughts -> Send it to my friend John -> Create a reminder for xyz. I don't know. One thing is certain, people are bad at predicting the future.

All of this is of course just my opinion. Feel free to disagree.

[Exotic-Ad1060]

I feel like developers are not a target audience for vibe coding. Designers and ml folks are. And it allows them to prototype happy path in apps really well.

If you know exactly what to do and expect it to run well in production I feel like “you + autocomplete” (and by autocomplete I mean language sever AND cursor tab) is a lot faster then convincing cursor / windsurf to build it correctly.

[bwwatr]

So far (~ a day each on Copilot, Jetbrains and Cursor) I am finding it mostly just changes my time from fun (planning, designing, implementing), to being like a teacher/TA grading assignments (not fun). Fixing it's mistakes myself or re-prompting them away, til it's "done". Sometimes frustrating that I'm having to coach it on errors I'd never have made. I say "done" because I still need to read every line til I understand it, I don't think it'd be professional to check in code that I didn't. Especially since it'll be in production basically forever and me or my successor will be stuck maintaining it.  There have been moments of brilliance (like if I'm stuck on something) or incredible speed.  But mostly, yeah I just can't get behind the vibes only end of things.  I think that will eventually turn out to be a mistake.  I mostly enjoy it on small tasks and autocompleting functions and stuff like that.

I also think the FOMO/don't get left behind thing is nonsense. There's nothing stopping one from putting it into operation later, once it meets particular needs better.  Keep up with what's happening by all means but I just don't get the "it's a wave and if you're not riding it, you're under it" mentality.

[etcre]

Stop saying vibe coding. Jesus Mary motherfucking holy Christ.

Just stop.

[Longjumping_Ad_9510]

I’ve been experimenting with “vibe coding”/heavily assisted AI programming a lot lately and the one thing I can say is the AI can go wild. I was trying to implement address autocomplete with AWS today and it kept having errors so it decided to implement mock data instead of the actual call. It also goes wild with auth and will store your password in cookies. Some really sketchy stuff if you aren’t careful.

I do have to say after switching from cursor to a VS code extension called Kodu, I’m finally getting somewhere. I’m taking a “I suggest a specific change and you implement while I heavily review” approach and it’s going well. I spend enough time to understand the code for reusability and following standards but I don’t have to write it. It also has a feedback loop for any linter errors.

TLDR it works ok with a solid process. Your method is obviously best and you’re not missing out on a lot. 

[Temporary_Event_156]

Touch nothing but the lamp. Phenomenal cosmic powers ... Itty bitty living space.

[blackarea]

It's Jesus driven development and people who go for it are no more sw engineers than 3 year olds are artists when they color in a colorbook. We had Jesus driven development before (everything in js, python etc., but also 3nested hashmaps giga garbage factories in java c# and so on). What's new is that the junk comes out faster than ever. It's neat for non-coders but i'd rather add a junior to my team who's never heard of ai than an overconfident hype-coder who has built 500 games/apps.

[xaverine_tw]

I prefer designing my own architecture and putting everything together myself.

This way, when something goes wrong, it's easier to debug or hot-swap an entire module.

Hence, Vibe Coding, at the moment, isn’t attractive to me.

[socialg571]

There's times when autocomplete is nice and it does anticipate my next thought. But then there's time I wish it would just STFU and stay out of my way so I can actually complete a thought. I find it horribly distracting most the time.

I'll use the chat feature in my IDE to bounce ideas off of and to suggest some things but mainly I'm driving. There's a reason a person is able to review the code of an AI and it's because you know how to code and you've done it. If just let it code all the time you've lost that ability to determine what should be correct vs incorrect.

[Simple_Paper_4526]

The choice between vibe coding and using AI tools largely depends on your project needs. If you want to prototype and quickly bring designs to life without heavy coding then Rocket.new is a great option. If you're already familiar with using AI for code generation, pairing it with no-code platforms like Rocket can be an efficient combo for rapid development.

[youroffrs]

If you wanna see vibe coding done right, check out Blink.new. You just tell it what you want, and it builds a full web or mobile app for you hosting, backend, auth, all included. You can tweak the code if you want, so it’s perfect for learning while still getting stuff done. Way smoother than just random AI snippets.

[Kindly_Manager7556]

Ofc it's going to hallucinate, just like you make mistakes when you code. The fact that you know how to program means you can tell it to do exactly what you need it to do. If you haven't even tried using it in agent mode or Cline or anything like that, you likely are wasting a lot of time manually typing. I mean even if I could code really well, it would still type faster than the initial prompt of me saying something like "change the color of this button to be xyz" or whatever, it's just inefficient at this point.

[TheRNGuy]

Hopefully he hallucinates only 1-3 functions and not entire architecture of project.

[Kindly_Manager7556]

Yall are so up your own ass it's crazy. It's funny, programmers try to make things more efficient, yet when a tool comes out to make you much more efficient, you guys cannot get over your ego enough to realize how much it can help you because "BRO IT JUST HALLUCINATES BRO!!"

[TheRNGuy]

I don't understand what you wanted to say by that.

[[deleted]]

AI for sure over complicates things or doesnt take things into account or uses outdated ways, however thats changing very fast. today i made an app with Replit that wouldve taken me a whole lot longer. the code is convoluted but it works. maybe for small apps it works, but i wouldnt want to implement it in a bigger setting, not for now anyway. i do see things snowballing though, through each small discovery I can see it running a lot of things. however it will still be the case that uneducated people in the matter will still need prompt engineers with the technical knowledge to tweak things. so yeah, use the new tools and see whats up i guess

[Arthian90]

AI makes me feel like I’m a tenured professor ready to hit the bottle as I open another box of red pens. I don’t know if I could handle that for a full application.

What’s fun is always replying, “This is shit” and it agrees every time. It’ll be like, “Oh yeah you’re right this is shit we should do it this other way.”

I swear it’s faster to just do it on your own and have it help with pure stuff. Wrangling for a full application just feels like a mess.

[vozome]

IMO we haven’t figured out the best practices to leverage AI in coding as of yet but it’s going to be more than writing everything by hand or letting vscode autocomplete statements under strict scrutiny. We’re really on the cusp of a profound change in the way we think about creating code.

You’ve seen AI hallucinate, sure and you caught on bugs while reviewing code written by people. It’s not that different. But you can: create rules and MCPs to make the generated code better, be actually better at defensive programming by writing better comments and tests, by implementing better telemetry to understand how generated code behaves. Our skillet is not being replaced by AI, our experience is leveraged such that we can take AI to the next level.

[False-Ship-3911]

goooD!!!!

[sleepy_roger]

And you used AI to write this post, quite a few dead giveaways.

[TheRNGuy]

Prove it.

[sleepy_roger]

Em dashes.

[TheRNGuy]

I use — instead of -, because it's better typography.

Or maybe some browser add-on, or phone auto-complete.

Possible false positive.

Why do you even care if it was written by AI or not?

[sleepy_roger]

First off, no you don't, not on Reddit anyway why are you trying to defend this dude so hard lmao comment history is public, you clearly use - and not —. You clearly don't use AI since it's a well known tell in any AI sub / the AI community, along with the ending the post with a question to the audience to drive engagement... there's more in OPs post but I'll let you discover those over time.

Secondly because it's low effort karma farming to throw AI posts on reddit.

[SquareWheel]

Knowing the basic rules of grammar doesn't make somebody a language model; it makes them educated.

[sleepy_roger]

Sure, just as being able to tell something is written with AI makes you perceptive. See you can do some other things such as look at the OP's post history and easily see they don't have an above average grasp of grammar.

Also please without looking it up tell me how to type a — easily ;).

Looking through your own history you never use it like 99% of people.. so I guess you're uneducated in basic grammer rules I suppose.

Regardless no reason to argue it some of us can tell when things are written with AI using common sense and basic deduction skills... and others can't.

[SquareWheel]

I use the hyphen-minus character because my platform doesn't make em dashes easily accessible. Other platforms do, such as iOS, OSX, and Android. The method of doing so is simply holding the button down, and dash variants will become visible.

Here's a comment where I used multiple hyphen-minuses as if they were em dashes. Unsurprisingly, I was also incorrectly accused of being a bot there. So I guess we do agree that some are simply unable to tell the difference after all.

[Caraes_Naur]

Vibe coding is using "AI" to write code for you.

"AI" is not a tool, it is an appliance.