[hansmayer]

> I'm not a professional SWE

It was already obvious from your first paragraph - in that context even the sentence "everything works like I think it should" makes absolute sense, because it fits perfectly to limited understanding of a non-engineer - from your POV, it indeed all works perfectly, API secrets in the frontend and 5 levels of JSON transformation on the backend side be damned, right ;) Yay, vibe-coding for everyone - even if it takes longer than the programming the conventional way, who cares, right?

[westoncb]

It sounds more like you just made an overly simplistic interpretation of their statement, "everything works like I think it should," since it's clear from their post that they recognize the difference between some basic level of "working" and a well-engineered system.

Hopefully you aren't discouraged by this, observationist, pretty clear hansmayer is just taking potshots. Your first paragraph could very well have been written by a professional SWE who understood what level of robustness was required given the constraints of the specific scenario in which the software was being developed.

[brailsafe]

By your response, it really seems like you read their first sentence as advocating for vibe coding, but I think they were saying something more to the effect of "While it's exciting to reach those milestones more quickly and frequently, as it becomes easier to reach a point where everything seems to be working on the surface, the easier it then is to bypass elegant, properly designed, intimately internalized detail—unavoidable if written manually—and thus when it comes time to troubleshoot, the same people may have to confront those rapidly constructed systems with less confidence, and hence the maintenance burden later may be much greater than it otherwise would be"

Which to me, as a professional SWE, seems like a very engineer thing to think about, if I've read both of your comments correctly.

[observationist]

Exactly - I know enough to know what I don't know, since I've been able to interact with professionals, and went down the path of programming far enough to know I didn't want to do it. I've also gotten good at enough things to know the pattern of "be really shitty at doing things until you're not bad, and eventually be ok, and if you work your ass off, someday you'll actually be good at it".

The neat thing about vibe coding is knowing that I'm shitty at actual coding and achieving things in hours that would likely have taken me months to learn to do the right way, or weeks to hack together with other people's bubblegum and duct tape. I'd have to put in a couple years to get to the "OK" level of professional programming, and I feel glad I didn't. Lucky, even.

[burningChrome]

>> even if it takes longer than the programming the conventional way, who cares, right?

Longer than writing code from scratch, with no templates or frameworks? Longer than testing and deploying manually?

Even eight years ago when I left full-stack development, nobody was building anything from scratch, without any templates.

Serious questions - are there still people who work at large companies who still build things the conventional way? Or even startups? I was berated a decade ago for building just a static site from scratch so curious to know if people are still out there doing this.

[tjr]

What do you mean by "the conventional way"?

[burningChrome]

I was referencing OP's statement.

"conventional programming"

Key Characteristics of Conventional Programming:

Manual Code Writing

- Developers write detailed instructions in a programming language (e.g., Java, C++, Python) to tell the computer exactly what to do.

- Every logic, condition, and flow is explicitly coded.

Imperative Approach

- Focuses on how to achieve a result step by step. Example: Writing loops and conditionals to process data rather than using built-in abstractions or declarative statements.

High Technical Skill Requirement

- Requires understanding of syntax, algorithms, data structures, and debugging. No visual drag-and-drop or automation tools—everything is coded manually.

Longer Development Cycles

- Building applications from scratch without pre-built templates or AI assistance. Testing and deployment are also manual and time-intensive.

Traditional Tools

- IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) like Eclipse or Visual Studio. Version control systems like Git for collaboration.

[lelanthran]

>> I'm not a professional SWE, I just know enough to understand what the right processes look like, and vibe coding is awesome but chaotic and messy.

> It was already obvious from your first paragraph - in that context even the sentence "everything works like I think it should" makes absolute sense, because it fits perfectly to limited understanding of a non-engineer - from your POV, it indeed all works perfectly, API secrets in the frontend and 5 levels of JSON transformation on the backend side be damned, right ;)

I mean, he qualified it, right? Sounds like he knew exactly what he was getting :-/