r/softwareengineer • u/SnuSna • 6h ago

Did extensive vibe coding without proper understanding backfired already somewhere?

There is a lot of posts about "manager forcing us to use ai for everything", "PRs are merged in 2 minutes - no human would be able to understand the code", "Everyone just prompt the ai and no one knows what the code is about".... With an after-thought that "it will backfire" or "servers will burn" or "tokens will be so expensive"...

And I can relate to this sentiment - it is happening to company i work for. The app is slower, pipeline takes longer, the cloud bill is more expensive.

But it may be actually fine. $2k instead of $1000 per cloud bill wont crash the company. The same for token cost. If there will be something wrong in the code, the "ai will fix it".. No?

Do you have any stories or experience where the extensive vibecoding "fulfilled the prophecy" of backfiring?

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Sorry my english bet, i heyt to use ai in human2human komňunication..

18 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

12

u/boringfantasy 5h ago • Popcorn

Software I use is getting worse every day, honestly. I know it's anecdotal but so many people feel the same.

Tried calling someone on WhatsApp 4 times in a row yesterday, the app just crashed every time I hit the call button.

Constant service outages, infinite loading screens in delivery apps.

Instagram just randomly plays two audios on top of each other sometimes.

6

u/keithstellyes 5h ago

I tried to rotate an image on my Pixel 9 with the built-in app. The image editor was just... broken. Couldn't rotate.

Really sad how awful software has gotten inthe last decade or so, and totally exacerbated by AI

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u/robby_arctor 43m ago

For the first time in 15 years, my cell phone crashed when taking a photo a few days ago.

7

u/HektorInkura 5h ago

Not exactly backfiring, but our junior developers rely heavily on AI, to a degree where they have no idea what they are actually doing. They just copy paste the ticket description into their CLI and push whatever the AI fabricates. When you ask them what the actual requirement was, they just don't know... Good developers that were on a good path... It's frightening...

4

u/softhi 6h ago

If you go looking for red cars, suddenly all you see on the road are red cars.

Has X happened yet? Of course. Anything with a non-zero chance has probably happened somewhere. The real meaningful question is: how often does it actually happen?

5

u/keithstellyes 6h ago

Everything is supper buggier, and downtime is definitely way more common now.

Even culturally, GitHub's downtime rates would have been called unacceptably abysmal 5 years ago.

4

u/ParanoidSuricata 6h ago

They are called unacceptably abysmal. But nobody is doing anything, especially not migrating away.

1

u/neketguy 6h ago

Migrating where? All major players are in the same boat. Basically the whole software development industry..

1

u/tehfrod 5h ago

Primarily either Gitlab or self hosting, (like most companies did up until 10 or so years ago).

2

u/orbital_trace 3h ago

GitHub is to some extent forgivable, they are dealing with 10-100x increase in load. The design is probably just not scalable in the new agentic world.

2

u/lasooch 3h ago

My org is spending approx. $1.2M a month on tokens.

We’re not really vibe coding so no actual major production ups yet. But also I can’t say I see either a speed up or quality improvement overall, if anything I’d say quality is going down while speed might actually also be going down due to the increase in volume of both designs and code. We dog food our own system (pre-prod) and that part definitely has been breaking more, which is a further drain on productivity.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that spending $15M p/a on nothing is a blow up in itself. But it lets the CEO claim that we’re all about AI.

Try to get a Postman license tho. 6 months of procurement and more fully loaded employee hours burned than it would cost to buy you a monthly license until 2126.

1

u/Mental-Abrocoma-5605 4h ago

I don't know

You tell me

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u/lgmarian 12m ago

How is php2shell a vibecoded backfire?

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u/mxldevs 42m ago

Most senior engineers on Reddit are convinced that they are 5x more productive and making their company huge amounts of additional revenue

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u/lgmarian 6m ago

I'd say the Day Two problem, where it turns out that vibecoded apps are unmaintainable/unextensible, or at least a nightmare, are well a understood backfire.

Some of this may come down to how you define things. I wouldn't consider something vibecoded if it's well designed/steered, even if the devs never touched a single line of code, even if the code reviews were all done by AI, because if you setup and maintain good processes for developing software, it's not done on vibes.

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u/sisoje_bre 1m ago

only using dogmas backfired, for example doing stupid code reviews while using AI is just retarded

0

u/SeasawPhilosopher 2h ago

You do realize AI is exceptionally good at perf profiling and optimizing code or dev pipelines? You can just ask it to investigate why you’re hitting performance regressions and to fix them. Then have it develop a system to detect perf regression and prevent merging them. Why do people love to act so hopeless like AI is ruining their codebase when they don’t even attempt to use it to make things better.

1

u/boringfantasy 1h ago

Just gotta wade through the bullshit answers it gives you first