I’ve seen this term thrown around a lot lately and I just wanted to read your opinion on the matter. I feel like I’m going insane.
Vibe coding is essentially asking AI to do the whole coding process, and then checking the code for errors and bugs (optional).
I mean, at some point you have to realize that instructing an AI on every single thing you want to do starts to look a lot like programming.
Programming isn’t just writing code. It’s being able to reason about a method of doing things. Until AI is at the level of designer, you can expect humans to have to do the brunt of the work to bring software to life.
Yeah, there’s also the “debugging is just as hard as writing elegant code” side of things. Vibe coding is largely just putting yourself in a permanent debugging role.
The big issue I see with vibe coding is that you need to know best practices to build secure code. Even if you don’t adhere to them all the time, best practices exist for a reason. And a programmer who doesn’t even know them is a dangerous thing, because they won’t even be able to see what is insecure (until it’s far too late).
Studies have found that vibe coders tend to produce less secure code, but have higher confidence in their code being secure; It’s essentially Dunning-Kruger in practice. I’d have no issue with someone using AI to get the broad strokes down. But then they need to be able to back it up with actual debugging. Not just “I didn’t even bother looking at it. If it compiles, push it to prod.”