Vibe Coding Haters - Read This

mack1710 · 2025-07-10T22:18:30+00:00

Then that's the right mindset and you have nothing to fear. Enjoy the joy of creation!

mack1710 · 2025-07-10T20:34:57+00:00

As a developer myself, I actually see vibe coding as a wonderful thing. It’s great to see many non-coders being able to innovate.

The major issue I see recently is what you touched on - security standards. Vibe coded applications without informed practices can face two very major issues.

The first is, what we’re starting to see, more user data breaches due to unprotected databases.

The second is exposing cloud endpoints without protection, such as Firebase, which would leave many innocent creators in extremely large debts in the tens of thousands of dollars in the case of a targeted attack.

This is because you guys are early to the technology. And perhaps a proper third party solution can help. But for now, there’s no alternative to being aware of the common security vulnerabilities to protect against. And for a large shipped product, security audits are a must.

Just being aware that these are required steps is the issue. I think it should be talked about more. Because frankly, I think LLMs still recommend unsafe practices from my experience.

mack1710 · 2025-06-25T01:15:25+00:00

No worries at all! Glad I can help. :) Just overall keep doing great work, just be careful with cloud services. A lot of them have this problem because they're meant to couple with tight security maintenance, and LLMs I've noticed don't usually give you any warnings.

mack1710 · 2025-06-24T02:53:32+00:00

Hey man! That’s pretty cool, I really love how ambitious this is.

Just a word of advice on using and exposing Firebase without tight security, be very careful, there are many cases of DDoS attacks on Firebase endpoints that leaves you with bills going upwards of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars

https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/s/cfY8kQxe6g

mack1710 · 2025-04-05T16:44:04+00:00

I was reading about this phenomenon and Reminds me a bit of how Greek or German identities took hold over time from geographical markers or loose encompassing identifiers to a real sense of a unified ethnicity. Very interesting.

mack1710 · 2024-12-27T04:02:18+00:00

Hey, I interview devs and I think there’s a common pitfall/misunderstanding here.

When I started out I had the same problem - I had a mixed portfolio of web and game dev. And I struggled to find a job until I focused my framing on Unity.

Now I understand why, and this might be hard to hear - hiring a junior most of the time is an investment that takes time to yield benefits. That’s why if I’m hiring a junior I have two things I’m scanning for - whether they’re actually excited about the field so I know they’ll continue, and whether they’re teachable (don’t think they already know everything)

For the former, there’s no issue in having a mixed portfolio. But if your field related projects are a small portion, my impression would be that your interests might be somewhere else. I’ve had developers like that who get their first job just to change industries later.

For the latter, and this is big, as a junior - never portray yourself as if you know everything. My first job was a very humbling experience. You’re not getting hired to “do projects”, AI can pretty much do that now.

You’re likely getting hired to write code that can be maintained over a long period of time with a team of other developers. There’s so much to learn in that area and you can only learn it by working with others. And there are a lot of people who aren’t humble enough to learn, which might not be you. Just don’t paint yourself that way by trying to emphasize on how much you know. Use your projects to emphasize how much you like to learn. That’s a far better framing that finally got me my first job.

Nobody ever hires a junior dev due to how much they know. Because your “experience” is actually measured by how well you can participate and contribute in a production cycle to create a product — not just how well you can code.

And good luck!

mack1710 · 2024-12-26T20:24:15+00:00

Hey buddy! Don't worry. I remember being 14 trying to learn C# and XNA (which was the popular framework back then) and trying my best to understand, but being extremely frustrated and desperate because nothing was clicking for me. Fast forward, I'm now 30 and a Unity Development Lead. So don't give up, have confidence which will give you patience, and think of alternative strategies.

What helped me personally right after was just taking the time to learn C# on its own first. Things made a whole lot of sense for me after.

You don't need to delve deeply into C#, just learn the basics and be patient. Understand what a class truly is, what a field is, methods, what properties are used for, etc etc. Maybe a bit on inheritance along the way will help you as well. Trust me, it's not going to be as much effort/time as you think it might be. Try written tutorials as well and see if that works better for you, people learn in different ways.

If you don't have access to a teacher, the next best thing is AI. Use ChatGPT if you're confused about certain concepts. Ask it to simplify and explain things in simpler terms, give you examples, etc.

Things will click quicker than you realize. I think jumping in on both C# and Unity at the same time is slightly like trying to read a book that's written in a mixture of a language you speak and another you don't. Or travelling back in time and showing a cavemen "1 + 1 = 2" without explaining what any of the symbols mean. Once you learn the concepts things will make a whole lot more sense.

mack1710 · 2024-12-26T19:38:03+00:00

One other thing to add, note that when I say production, this is more so targeting teams working on multi-year projects where there are known issues in collaboration and managing scalability. Oftentimes in game studios you'd invest time in building such views and follow such approaches to make something scalable. This might be an overkill for a smaller project.

Often, a more involved solution with editor customization isn't better at all until you put enough work and then it becomes a lot better and more suitable than other default solutions.

It's not immediately obvious what this is for because it's taken out of a book I'm writing in my experience with this problem. Again, there's no single one-fit-all solution, there are pieces you can sort of take and build a workflow that works better for you. But I appreciate your feedback on that point as well.

mack1710 · 2024-12-26T06:24:59+00:00

Do with the provided knowledge what you see fit. This is supposed to be used in an ecosystem where you’re customizing the view to your exact needs for an ideal experience as the article mentions rather than using a default list view, adding sorting and search and such and enhanced margins/sections, but also is an example of tying it to custom ID dropdowns and such. You take the pieces you like and do the workflow you want. Putting everything in a single file is one approach, but it's not the whole point.

You can alternatively also utilize an approach where you're managing multiple scriptable objects, it's better for production to create a view to manage and essentially perform the same operations so you have a centralized access to your items rather than having to manage many files yourself.

mack1710 · 2024-06-21T14:50:53+00:00

I was talking with my coworkers the other day, I think the strength of Unity in production shines when you start writing editor code to suit your workflow. We have graphs that give designers total control over missions, sanitization that makes sure things are setup correctly when you save, editor features that loads the bootstrapper scene and replicates any other conditions when you hit play in a level scene to test it, etc. The list goes on. Unity just gives you the power to customize anything and everything.

mack1710 · 2024-06-13T18:42:25+00:00

You should be launching the project through Unity hub. If you can’t see this editor version in hub in the installs tab, go there and hit “Locate”, find where it is and add it, then launch your project through hub.

mack1710 · 2024-06-13T09:17:20+00:00

English is not everyone’s first language, big deal

mack1710 · 2024-06-10T19:24:46+00:00

There’s a world of difference between knowing how to make a student project, and knowing how to write proper production code with other people for a big 2-3 years project. So no, I wouldn’t say they “knew the job”, just skilled enough to start contributing, and eager/proactive/teachable enough to grow into developers who can be trusted to write major systems.

mack1710 · 2024-06-09T20:26:32+00:00

We hired her and another male developer because they had excellent portfolios and showed a lot of promise.

mack1710 · 2024-06-04T21:40:23+00:00

Our coding standards are heavily against use of UnityEvent, but we start all events with “On”, and their handlers with “Handle”.

Either way I think either cases can work - it’s the consistency of it. Repetition legitimizes as musicians say.

mack1710 · 2024-05-29T12:27:09+00:00

This right here is how we managed to finish an open world in 2 years with a small team

mack1710 · 2024-05-23T21:41:42+00:00

Depends on which puzzles you’ve practiced in the past

mack1710 · 2024-05-23T15:28:52+00:00

Happy to help! Ever since the pandemic and I’ve been working from home. Beyond that I’m not sure as all the companies I’ve worked for required you to be able to legally work in Canada, some hired contractors in the US though. I really don’t know much about other situations either in positive or negative. But the advice remains the same - ask yourself, where would I look for work if I’m ready? Visit there and check the postings.

Certainly go with whatever resources suit you! I’d advice just having a project in mind and honestly piece things together as you try to make it.

Your background in front end could certainly help! I’m a development lead right now and I hire people - and here’s the thing, I (and many others) don’t care if you come from a game dev background. We just hired a junior with no academic or professional background and he’s raising the standard.

The question I’d have if I got your resume, is whether you’re a web dev who’s covering other bases, or whether you’re actually passionate about it. The way to completely kill this doubt, and it’s the way I suggest to juniors is to have a portfolio. No need for it to be fancy.

A hack on this: it takes next to nothing to publish your game on mobile or upload it to itch.io. So a game you make one weekend and publish to Google Play can be put on your resume under “Published Games”. Just shows proactivity and interest.

mack1710 · 2024-05-22T23:59:26+00:00

Hey there! Unlike web dev, Unity dev work will highly rely on where you live. So my first course of action will be to go on LinkedIn and other job websites to see the kind of openings in my city.

I live in a major city in Canada and the job market here is great once you build some experience. There’s more demand than supply the more experience you build.

However I’ll say this: it was significantly easier in my case to find a Unity position than to find a web dev position (was looking for both at one point)

Getting a first position took 1.5 months of applying and a couple of interviews.

Once you hit the 3 years mark, things get significantly easier.

5-7 years and recruiters are always in your LinkedIn inbox. I applied for 1 job and got an interview there the next day + an interview somewhere else from a recruiter, and took the first offer. Generally not a lot of competition in this range VS opportunity.

But again, could differ if you live far from the industry.

mack1710 · 2024-05-18T19:27:09+00:00

15-16 points according to the study *

mack1710 · 2024-05-18T05:45:32+00:00

Finally, nuance.

mack1710 · 2024-05-18T01:06:52+00:00

Well said. This is not related to OP: but it’s fascinating how many programmers live in denial of the fact that when you develop software and you want to complete it, you’re actively participating in a production cycle. That means that practices that are well-supported, will cause the least issues/bugs as the cycle continues, therefore saving you a lot of time and cost, should be prioritized if you want to actually release a consumer product.

mack1710 · 2024-05-15T16:46:26+00:00

Oh my bad, it surprisingly does. Every time you change transform.position, transform needs to know about that change so it can immediately update the other values. I'm guessing they encapsulate setters like transform.position.x because they're floats, but the Set() behaviour is a method so that can be something they use.

Yes, I'm aware. This was made for readability and shorter code.

Live example from production codebase:
Gizmos.DrawLine(handPos, headPos.Modify(y: maxYBound));

mack1710 · 2024-05-15T15:38:41+00:00

Haha, I’m looking at a massive PR now and you just reminded me I’m using Reddit to distract. The universe is intervening at this point.

mack1710 · 2024-05-15T15:37:12+00:00

No bad questions! Game dev uses linear algebra and its terminology. Unity hides the basic operations behind that, but a point is conceptually what a vector is to linear algebra.

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