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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2026
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The problem with vibe coding is that progress is great at first, it can build out the basic structure of an application, a data layer, some functionality that works, etc. But as the application gets more complex, it really starts to struggle to add that complexity without it getting confused and throwing out stuff that works because it can't get the new parts to work. Or it forgets a structure that has been implemented, and designs a whole new structure for each added part, so you end up with massive regressions, a Frankenstein's monster of different styles and implementations, and a very inconsistent application that just feels wrong to use. And if you now need to go in to the code to improve it yourself, you'll either hit a wall of your own ability, or you'll spend all your time trying to fit the square peg into the round hole that the ai generated. A complex application like Photoshop will never be replaced in it's entirety by a vibe coder, not without good engineers keeping everything in check for the long term.
It's the 80/20 principle.
Getting a piece of software done, the main work, the 80%, takes 20% of effort.
Refining the remaining 20% on the other hand takes 80% of all effort and time invested.
Another aspect is burnout. Sure, vibe coding means sped up development, but what I noticed was... I also lost interest in projects much quicker. Unless it directly delivers something I need - e.g. I've built a 3D printer stand for my new Bambu H2C - it's going on the pile of "80% finished crap".
And the thing is, you CAN build an AI setup that automates everything. I've put together a skill/agent/rule stack that is essentially an entire company's engineering department. It works autonomously, only looping in the user for major decisions (and those decisions get a proper report the user can read to contextualise the decision itself). It creates initiatives, epics, then refines those into stories, then stories get planned with tasks, subtasks, etc., which then get the design-develop-test-verify loop (test here stands for test writing, while verify is the QA smoke test). Stories get the appropriate level of detail, with a BDD approach (so happy path, unhappy path, and edge case scenarios are defined before work begins), experts are created on-demand, the list goes on. All of this with 6-8-10 parallel teams.
It works incredibly effectively.
It also burns through tokens like there's no tomorrow. I let it run over a weekend - Saturday morning to Sunday midnight. It correctly identified the project needs for a relatively small thing (something a sole developer would write over 2-3 months), created an appropriate enterprise approach, broke it down into 9 MVP stages, and in 2 days, delivered the first four of those.
At the cost of burning through an entire weekly allowance of Claude Max 20X tokens...
I guess I could pay another £150 for a secondary account and have it churn through my old projects to refine and finalise them, but it's hardly worth the money.
And no, while I say that it's a "full company", it's only because I am an actual software engineer, I understand the code being written, I understand the processes, the flows. It's not something you can toss to a complete beginner and have them build a successful business on top.
With LLM it's closer to 60/40, you can get an MVP in a day or two, but the next step is either impossible or so hard it will require so much resources that it makes it almost impossible. But if you start with a very clear idea of architecture and software stack - in that case you'll get 80/20. Then the real problem starts - you don't know your code, and have no idea how everything interacts and there going to be thousands or tens of thousands of lines of shit that does nothing or done something in the past that LLM forgot to remove, or it left a document that describes it so it won't remove it and so on.
It's kind of weird because it kind of acts like 80/20, but you end up doing a significant effort to unwind things back to 60/40 to start trying to massage it to what you really need.
Assuming it's one of the areas where it does relatively strongly, other areas it will flounder far worse and for some scenarios it can essentially one shot a working thing, if it is really a supremely common and simple thing.