AI is NOT Replacing Software Engineers… Yet
I'm all for making more makers but I’m still surprised people are expecting purely vibe-coded AI apps to scale.
We've been experimenting with a bunch of prompt to app tools -- lovable, v0, bolt, etc.
They work really well if you're doing things like:
- Speeding up the first 20% of a project
- Working mostly on the frontend
- Prototyping or visualizing flows quickly
- Building something with very simple functionality
Huge, mindblowing time-savers in these scenarios! 🤯 You skip the setup and get something on screen fast.
But once the app gets more complex, the cracks start to show:
-
60% of the time and tokens are spent prompting bug fixes
- Backend integration is tough (e.g. adding auth burned my tokens!)
- Code quality gets really messy
- Security vulnerabilities galore
AI is a great accelerator — but it’s still not a replacement for real engineering, like the hype posts claim (at least not yet 😄)