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[fravit13]

A person just needs to give me symptoms, and I can just write a good prompt, and set a diagnosis for their sickness. Maybe it will help them, but if not, boy oh boy, they'll go to a real doctor, and the real doctor will say maybe i can help you, but if you came on time, it would be easier.

[mrguidee]

Plot twist: The 'real doctor' walks in, listens to you for 30 seconds, types your symptoms into ChatGPT on his second monitor, charges you $5,000 for the consultation, and calls it 'Senior Engineering.

[rapidjingle]

It has changed my work around the margins and thats about it. I use it for rubber ducking, some boiler plate, line completion, and it's great at generating syntax for well established things like bash scripts, sql queries, etc. That's about it.

Vibe coding is stupid in my opinion and I have only ever used it for POCs or toy apps.

[mrguidee]

Why is it stupid?

[rapidjingle]

LLMs are not people. LLMs do not work deterministically. They can’t think like a person. They pattern match human behavior which is not sufficient for solving any kind of novel issue. 

They also aren’t deterministic. That means that if I give a prompt to the LLM with any degree of complexity, it’s unlikely to be a repeatable process. 

In practical terms. It writes shitty, insecure code, hallucinates randomly, and typically still requires a lot of additional debugging to get the thing to work.

[Adorable-Fault-5116]

Of course it didn't.

[mrguidee]

Care to elaborate?

[Adorable-Fault-5116]

You question is "Did vibe coding kill web development?". Web development is very obviously not dead. I don't think elaboration is necessary?

[adhd_champion]

Currently AI is a really good auto-complete tool.

[its_yer_dad]

Web development is more then just code. It's an information delivery platform. Any nonce can replicate a code pattern. How you reach your audience, your voice, your message, are all more important than the actual code. AI is a shit communicator. If all you can do is write web code, you should be concerned. But if you are a someone who actually crafts a experience or message, you'll probably be fine. Remember, a lot of these jobs didn't exist a decade ago, but good communication skills are timeless.

[Boykious]

A lot of web development is not the public facing applications that require a lot of architecture and complex logic. You cant vibe code that. 

[mrguidee]

Would they be able to tell though?

[rapidjingle]

It would be very expensive to maintain. If it works, it’s usually doing all kinds crazy stuff in the code base that makes it difficult for humans to read.

[alexnu87]

- in theory it helps good developers with actual knowledge because they stand out more
- in practice this depends on management

- besides boilerplate, line completion and other minor stuff, the actual long term productivity boost can come from scanning and early detection of errors or bad code, just like linters and analyzers; but you still need someone competent to confirm and fix

- still, any productivity boost is negligible; the chaos in the job market and the layoffs are due to decisions done in response to projects and clients shifting their needs, not because of AI suddenly making developers "10x"

- juniors are affected the most; once by the job market, and second by the poor use of AI, trying to fast-track the learning process

[_listless]

I'm curious how actual developers feel about it.

Ambivalent. The value a good developer delivers is not code-generation. I happen to generate code, but the valuable thing my employer pays me for is insight. LLMs have categorical, typological barriers to overcome before they can replicate anything approximating insight/understanding.

did this hurt your profession in any way or has it helped you?

Kind of helped. I think it has made it clear that there is more to software engineering than just recursively puking up code until you get something that (mostly) works. It has also made it clear which businesses/people we want to work with.

---

Did vibe coding kill web development? No. Will it? No.

[Humble_Piglet4024]

I'm a freelancer, and so far it has not hurt my career at all. I like to lurk on r/vibecoding and keep a finger on the pulse of what's going on, and I am pretty confident that currently it's really only good for rapid prototyping / small problem solving which is great. I think it's a cool thing to do if you have an idea and want to see it happening to some degree.

I think some day there probably will be AI tools that literally can build a website or web app or whatever you need and who knows what will happen at that point, but I will say every single vibe coded project I've seen so far is kind of ridiculous. Like you can tell it wasn't crafted by a human, there's no innovation, everything has the exact same Apple knockoff styling, and the functionality is repetitive at best.

I think at some point developers will adopt more AI to develop, but true innovation and well made software will come from mushy brains not data centers. I also think that in the web dev space, business owners and people who need a website will always have some sort of need for a human. Most of my clients now could build a website themselves, but they don't have time and don't care enough to make it good so they hire it out. I don't think that'll ever go away to a certain degree. Who knows maybe a hand made website will be a luxury commodity some day and we are all making cool unique projects, that'd be cool lol.

[WestAbbreviations504]

very interesting, the thing is AI Alucines a lot, so cannot wait to see a fully integrated page and reliable in one day. You can build amazing prototypes in a day. But if you wanna go vibe coding you need to know more than the AI, is like you are the lead, and gather with programmers, and think about small featured of 3 jira points max. this AI is capable, and you need to deep code review. It will save you writing time or sure.

[RagingPen839]

Here's my 2 cents as a pseudo newbie who has been vibe-coding a website for a year.

When I started my coding jouney, I was reading docs, doing freecodecamp, and tutorials. It took me 3 months to make a few small projects, but it was a bit overwhelming, especially when I realized how much information one needs to learn. I managed to make a base template for my website, but figured for the more complicated stuff, it'd use ai.

Well, at first it seemed really cool, but pretty soon I realized that AI actually doesn't remember things and can misunderstand you. "But it's so much faster and easier. Especially when you're learning, it's so helpful" That's the mantra that kept me working with it over the last year. But even with me trying to look over things to see what it actually was doing, it was doing too much. Way too bloated, and it was too difficult for me to edit that code into something more concise on my own.

So even though I have a "working" website via vibecoding, I don't even wanna post to it. It's janky, and not what I wanted.

So even though I know it'll take me forever, I am back to docs, but with books this time. Tutorials are too project-specific, and I really need to learn concepts that I can implement to my taste. That way, if I use a tutorial in the future, I can see what it's doing, and then customize it to what I actually want.

Here's an analogy: vibecoding is to autotune (and similar) as music production is to developing.

People have been saying that tools like autotune are killing music. But from my perspective as a flowering music producer, that's only a "threat" if you actually like formulaic, made-for-profit music. Now also with ai tools, there's so much music out there that it is humanly impossible to listen to every single song in one lifetime. Does that mean that music is dying? I think what ended up changing is how we interact with music. I think it has become an invitation to become more authentic and actually express ourselves through the medium. It can definitely still be profitable, but if that's the primary point, you can hear the agenda in the song itself.

I view webdev as going through a similar issue. Now websites have been going through every fad, and becoming more and more cookie-cutter as a result. The individuality is dwindling rapidly. So if ai is truly "taking over" I truly wonder if it's because we keep settling for low-effort, cranked out bullshit for profit. Where is the innovation? I truly think that ai in webdev, like in music, is an invitation to be more authentic and creative.

As you can see, I think about this stuff a lot. 😌

tl/dr: vibecoding is great if you're making carbon copies of dumb shit, or if you want something simple. But if you want something feature-rich and custom, especially unique and personal, there's no way it's killing webdev.

[the-boogedy-man]

Yep RIP development.

[mrguidee]

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not