I Made the Mistake of Visiting the Vibe Coding Subreddit

Given that most social media cannot be accessed without an account, I largely fall back on Reddit now for news. Sure, I use Twitch and YouTube, but Reddit is the one place where I can briefly skim the top stories without an account. Unfortunately, that also means I get an uncurated feed, which sometimes includes posts from places like r/vibecoding. Needless to say, once I found out that subreddit existed, I lost some of my sanity. Surfing an Internet That Can't Track You Today, I figured I'd switch it up and do a little react content. I suppose I do a lot of "reacting to real things that happened to me" content, but this time I want to react to some online content. Now, I didn't come up with this idea and seek out the content. Instead, this is more of a thinly veiled "reacting to real things that happened to me" piece yet again. After all, the subreddit came to me via the Reddit algorithm. And if you're wondering how that's possible, let me explain. I've been on a bit of a privacy kick over the last year. I switched over to Proton for email, and a lot of my old online accounts now are "deleted." Likewise, I make use of their VPN as well as their cloud storage. Sure, it's probably not ideal to have "all my eggs in one basket," but I am very happy to be out of the Google ecosystem. I don't even use their search engine. In my crusade against Google, I've also migrated off chromium-based browsers, and I use basically the only alternative: Firefox. As a part of that transition, I've started using many of its privacy features, including blocking as many cookies as possible. Of course, when you try to surf the web anonymously, it becomes a bit harder to navigate. For example, whenever I close my browser, I lose all of my logins. This can be a bit annoying, but it's nothing a password manager can't easily smooth over. As a product of browsing the web as anonymously as possible, my experience online is not personalized. When I browse a website like Reddit, I'm served up whatever Reddit's algorithm can glean from my "profile," which is probably just my IP address (from my VPN) and any sort of fingerprinting from my browser. Therefore, when I open Reddit, I never really know what I'm going to get. It's kind of fun to try to quickly train the algorithm by browsing briefly. It only takes a couple of clicks to completely shift the front page from generic slop to some hyper specific niche, as if I've been figured out. A little note about this: literally in the middle of writing this piece, I noticed Reddit had seemingly changed their web interface for folks not logged in (i.e., the anonymous viewing experience). There's no option to browse popular or home anymore. It just prompts me to sign in and shows me what I assume is a generic feed. I'll see if I can still toy with the algorithm or if this is just going to feed me popular slop. If so, I suppose I'll be spending less time on Reddit, which will be a net positive to my life. On one such occasion, I was blessed with this ancient meme on a post titled, "Who are you???" https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1twjmhj/who_are_you/ In case this thread gets nuked later or the integration fails, the image is basically of a muscular doge and a crying doge. The muscular doge is labeled "experienced coder vibe coding," and it states, "wtf this thing can't even set up a database." The crying doge is labeled "noob coder vibe coding," and it states, "It generated a website in 5 minutes AI is AMAZING!!" This is where I want to start my reaction. Staring Into the Abyss You can imagine an image that appears to be dunking on vibe coding would pique my interest, so I clicked into the thread. It was only a matter of time before I wished I had not stared into the abyss. I want to start with a thread that's listed 3rd best for me. It begins with a comment that reads: - Take 25 lines of working code - Ask A.I. to add a simple feature - Get back 150 lines of non-working code - Add 5 lines yourself Nu7s, 2026-06-04 While I basically don't use "AI" at all, you probably read that I went a little insane this past semester while asking ChatGPT to fix up some student code. This comment captures that issue really well. AI always seems to miss the forest for the trees, but you'll never convince a vibe coder of that. How do I know? Read the comments. One comment that completely melted my brain reads: "That's a context document, planning, and prompt problem, or in other words: PEBKAC. (RyiahTelenna)" I have never in my life heard the phrase PEBKAC. And having now looked it up, I can say with certainty that whoever wrote this comment has to be older than me. Brother, just say "skill issue." With that said, I find this line of reasoning almost comical. A guy who can't write code without the assistance of a chat bot cannot be running around using the phrase "skill issue." Brother, you're the physical embodiment of one. You gave up before you even started. It's perhaps unsurprising then when our boy, RyiahTelenna, receives even the slightest pushback, they fold like a house of cards. One commenter writes: Nah, AI does wild things on a code base that is larger than the usual "I created a website in 5 minutes" use case. We have a product that integrates a ton of external APIs into our product. We tried creating more integrations through the help of AI. We really really try. We're using even the latest and most expensive cloud models and any tool you can think of to do so. The AI never gets it right. We have set up a ton of markdown files, explaining how our code works and what to do in order to expand it. The AI flat out ignores these files many times and does crazy stuff instead. Wrestler7777777, 2026-06-05 To me, this tracks. Even in the small use cases I've tried, I've been very disappointed with the results, so I can only imagine how bad these "tools" work in more complex environments. In fact, it's what you hear from folks like Jonathan Blow in the game development industry. It turns out that LLMs can't handle sufficiently complex codebases. Regardless of my thoughts, do you think RyiahTelenna concedes here? Of course not. They double down AND shift the goalposts. They so quickly give up the "skill issue" argument after someone demonstrates skill, so they pivot to: Which [AI]? Claude? Or the good one, Codex? RyiahTelenna, 2026-06-05 This is how every single conversation around AI goes with a sycophant. It's not possible that the tech isn't that good. It's not possible that the tech is perhaps not suited for a specific task. There must be something wrong with the person using it, or they're using the wrong model. I see this so many times with my students: "Oh, you're using the free model." "Oh, you're using ChatGPT, not Claude, Codex, etc." "Oh, you didn't inject enough context." To me, this speaks to just how horrendous this tech actually is. It's less science and more magic. You have to whisper to it in just the right way to get what you want. You have to use just the right combination of tools, and even then you have to reroll the outputs several times until you get something you like. I genuinely don't understand the allure. I mean agents are literally just a wrapper on this garbage, right? You go, "well, I don't want to spend all this time rerolling the output, so I'll set a process aside to do it." Isn't this all incredibly wasteful? The "efficiency" that everyone keeps touting seems to be at some incredible cost. The externalities to the environment and communities alone seem like enough to throw the tech away—to me at least. Not to mention the deskilling cost, but whatever makes the line go up, I guess. But Wait, There's More! While I found the comments insufferable in that thread, the entire subreddit itself is quite cursed. For example, feast your eyes on the following post: https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1tum2tw/if_you_could_travel_back_to_1950_with_access_to/ Again, for the sake of preserving the post, the title reads: "If you could travel back to 1950 with access to Claude Code Opus 4.8 Max (and it still worked), how would you use it to become rich? What's your exact step-by-step plan?" Underneath is a photo of the DeLorean from Back to the Future. I read this question like three times because it's completely baffling. What do you mean the specific brand name model, Claude Code Opus 4.8 Max? How would that even work (yes, I am aware that the question says "and it still worked"; that just raises more questions for me)? Do you mean running locally on your machine? And forgive my ignorance, but because it states "Claude Code," I had assumed that maybe folks in the thread would be discussing what software they would build in the past. Because of that, the question seemed even stupider. There's no hardware back then to run the things you'd want to build. You would have literally the most powerful machine on the planet. Like, forget Claude Code. Why not just walk into a research lab and hand them your laptop battery? Fortunately, most of the people in the thread were normal. Most of them clocked the absurdity of the question by mentioning that you'd have more success just bringing back a sports almanac. With that said, there were some alarming comments. For example, here's a comment from an account ironically called Korrectanswer. I promise I didn't add the typos: Step 1) Prompt Claude: Im in 1950 now, how to get fithly ritch with stuff that is not invented yet. Korrectanswer, 2026-06-07 Like, regardless of how absurd the original post is, isn't this answer kind of defeating the point? Like, aren't you meant to answer it as a person? Couldn't the poster just ask the chat bot instead? It all seems kind of absurd. What I didn't expect was to see another user, NimbusFPV, literally dump the question into Claude and post the result. Like guys, you are one step removed from being bots. Have some thoughts of the flesh. Several people did this. It was actually baffling. One guy says, "So from the horses mouth..." Another says, "Courtesy of Google Gemini." I find it so weird how we've gotten to a point where people think it's helpful to post the output of a chat bot. What happened to people smugly saying, "have you tried Googling it?" What happened to sharing your personal thoughts and maybe a couple references? Now, the dumbest people you know are just passing chat bot output back and forth. Running Into Walls While it's cathartic ranting about the posts in r/vibecoding, I'm still stuck on this point I made earlier around how these vibe coders always seem to have a way to move the goalposts. I saw this really nice comment that was immediately parried using the "have you tried X model?" strategy: Don’t beleive what people on the internet say, most of the code maybe maintained,reviewed and produced by AI but in production most of it fails, and then the same people need to use their manual efforts to debug 2000 lines of code written on separate files, which the AI knows nothing about, systems designs and what not, and then you have to spend hours and days trying to first understand and then debug it, so most “real coders” prefer manual coding with ai as an assistive tool, it’s not the engineer, you are. PracticalScallion403, 2026-06-01 Naturally, like moths to flame, a vibe coder spawned from the ether to defend their beloved LLM: This sounds like the opinion of someone who didn't use Opus 4.6+ (and comparable models) themselves, or tried but gave up quickly*.* I used to think the same before I tried it myself (and learning, lots of learning obtained by hands-on experience, on how to extract the best out of these models) The burden of specifying architecture, how to organize classes, etc, is on you, not the model. If you give it a vague specification it will make all sorts of assumptions and decisions for you, and many of them will inevitably be bad. wormangel, 2026-06-06 Every time I see a post like this, I have flashbacks to when my student complained that my "missing the forest for the trees" article didn't use a powerful enough model. That same student then asked me to help them make sense of a large git repo. Turns out expertise is still valuable. Fortunately, there are still some sane folks left, like in this thread. I'll spare you the copy/paste, but basically imagine a post where someone (read: bot) is thanking old school devs for all their hard work to enable vibe coding. I quite enjoyed the comments like: You’re welcome! And we’re enjoying watching y’all run full speed into walls over and over again. 😂 FineClassroom2085, 2026-06-07 Is this a bit boomer coded? Sure, but I subscribe to this level of petty at this point. Like, there are dozens of these. They're all gold. it might shock you, but it’s a profession that you can study, like accounting, art, law, or medicine. ;) _k33bs_, 2026-06-07 Personally, I'm really enjoying this "wall" talking point, which I might incorporate into a future article: not to ruin the party but you're running at a huge wall which you won't be able to go through izahariev96, 2026-06-07 I really feel like this whole mentality of "I don't need to learn this thing because AI can do it" is like running into a wall. What is the plan when AI becomes too expensive to use/maintain? What is the plan when AI never gets good enough to maintain software long term? What happens when none of the models can solve a problem? These are walls that are insurmountable without expertise. So, I suppose that's what I'll take away from the excursion through the dark depths of Reddit: the future of vibe coding is an ACME painted tunnel. Anyway, thanks for reading! This was a nice change of pace. Unfortunately, I'll be going back to my usual "philosophical thing that only I care about"-style of article next week. In the meantime, here's some more AI rants: Not All Code Completion Is Generative AI Generative AI Has a Short Shelf Life Generative AI Makes It Feel Bad to Be an Educator Likewise, I would love if you had some time to show some extra support by checking out my list of ways to grow the site. If not, no sweat! I'll see you next time.