i wish more folks would post P(how much I believe my own take) when they make takes.
I don't think the author is fundamentally wrong; but its delivered with a sense of certainty thats similar in tone to the past 5 years of skepticism that has repeatedly been wrong.
Instead of saying "vibe coded codebases are garbage", the author would be better served writing about "what does the perfect harness for vibe coded codebase look like so that it can actually scale to production"?
There's no way to know for sure. If there was, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But I'm trying to make an educated guess.
I read the news: AI is taking over and we'll soon all be out of jobs. So I have to decide. Do I double down on software engineering, pivot to vibe coding, or try something completely different?
I need a sense of certainty to make this call, so I researched it. This post is the result. I might be wrong, but at least I'm choosing a clear direction instead of constantly switching and never getting good at either.
Vibe coding today doesn't deliver anywhere near the value of a competent software engineer. Rather than extrapolate from past progress, I looked at what it would take today.
You asked about how we will turn a vibe-coded codebase into production-ready systems. I have no idea how we'll do that and I didn't find someone with a solid plan for it.
The logical conclusion here is that there's still plenty of runway for skilled software engineers. So I'm betting on becoming a better one with or without AI.
About "vibe coded codebases are garbage".
If someone doesn't know how to build software (or quality doesn't matter) vibe coding is perfect. The code might be garbage but it beats having nothing.
These projects would otherwise be Excel spreadsheets or duct-taped tools. Now they have another option.
The problem is when people suggest vibe coding replaces developer skills, as if producing code was the bottleneck.
That wasn't the take. The take is generally, "glorified next token predictor" quality LLM skepticism takes have been repeatedly proven wrong. See the original Cursor, Devin, etc announcement threads.
More broadly, its unfortunate that vibe coding is so overloaded a term.
- Yes, product managers with 0 coding expertise are contributing code in FAANG.
- Yes, experienced engineers are "vibe coding" to great success.
- Yes, folks with 0 years of experience were building simple calculators 2 years ago and are now building games, complex website, etc, just by prompting. Where will this go in another two years?
One needs look no further than kiro - Amazons own code editor thats being used extensively internally.
Folks bemoaning vibe coding are simply suffering from lack of imagination.
What was the take then? What has repeatedly been "proven wrong?" The original author's point was that it was a great tool for rapidly spinning up a prototype that quickly fell apart at any kind of scale or complexity. I've seen this pop up over and over, and in my own usage of it as well. They don't seem able to (yet) produce anything purely "vibe" coded at any kind of real complexity or scale. If it's happening, I'm extraordinarily interested in it, because I have a lot of projects I could get off the ground to make some additional money. So what apps are they?
It's not vibe coded, though. "Vibe coding" means taking the AI's code with no review at all. Whereas I carefully reviewed the AI's output for workers-oauth-provider.
I don't think the author is fundamentally wrong; but its delivered with a sense of certainty thats similar in tone to the past 5 years of skepticism that has repeatedly been wrong.
Instead of saying "vibe coded codebases are garbage", the author would be better served writing about "what does the perfect harness for vibe coded codebase look like so that it can actually scale to production"?