Comment by Traubenfuchs a day ago
I got one anecdote: My freelancing college friend said he started extensively vibe coding worst-quality slop that „just works“, making customers happy with unfixable slop, instead manually writing good or best practice stuff. He said there are many projects where he does not code at all anymore.
I need to get back to him and ask him why he isn‘t making more money than before…
Two problems:
- they started to realise they didn't have some of the domain knowledge (I specialise in maps/GIS), so couldn't steer it effectively
- they said that the changes it made started to become unstable: while making one change, it would break other things. It got harder and harder to make progress.
I suspect the second problem wouldn't happen as soon (or maybe not at all) with an experienced dev running the process.
I think that fast prototyping followed by a rewrite (in case the prototype confirmed the idea works) is the best use case for vibe coding.
A product person can quickly validate an idea and, once the project is a bit more concrete you can bring in the engineering team and start caring about security, maintenability, scaling and so. A rewrite is almost always the best thing, you can start with a solid foundation instead of spaghetti vibe coded stuff
So I have picked up one project where I'm rewriting a codebase vibe-coded by the non-technical founders.
It'll be interesting to see if that becomes a trend. Just what are people supposed to do with vibe coded codebases...