HN Explorer

Ask HN: Does Vibe Coding and Prompt Engineering make me an Software Engineer?

1 points by wasimsk ↗ HN
I’ve dialed in my prompts to the point where hallucinations are basically zero. I'm building full HTML/CSS/JS frontends, Rust backends, and GitHub Actions YMLs without typing a single line of code myself. My whole loop is just Gemini 3.1 + VS Code + GitHub. Has anyone else reached this point? Does writing syntax actually feel obsolete to you now, or am I just in a honeymoon phase?

Please clarify that to me.

7 comments

[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] thread
chvid
I guess. It is not a protected title, though. I personally prefer to have the title of black belt ninja kosmonaut hacker.
serf
do something that is hard with a lot of engineering depth to humble yourself about what wise people were capable of before LLMs.

My honeymoon ended and reality struck when I was LLMing together cuda kernels for poker solvers a few LLM-gens ago.

it got solved, but boy was it a slog -- but on the bright side it was an LLM-based endeavor that forced me to learn a whole lot about cuda kernels, that was a pretty cool side effect.

as for titles, who cares? I vote for grand poobah.

rvz
To answer the first question:

No.

Software Engineers do way more than just “coding”.

Playing MS flight simulator does not make you a captain of a commercial plane full of passengers.

> Does writing syntax actually feel obsolete to you now, or am I just in a honeymoon phase?

No.

I don’t think I would let a vibe coder anywhere near software that is used in critical infrastructure.

cameolkc
If the AI writes the code and you can fix what breaks, that counts as engineering. The title comes from accountability for production systems. Prompt engineering has a separate problem: your tuned prompts break or become unnecessary every time the model upgrades. The effort you put into prompts today will probably be wasted. That same churn also means entry gets easier
elzbardico
Your twitter account is at most a month old, your HN 4 days old, all your comments are exactly like this one: superficially interesting enough to generate engagement but low in real content.

You look like another openclaw instance to me.

ohelm
"Does Vibe Coding and Prompt Engineering make me an Software Engineer?"

Absolutely not.