Probably you’ve heard the term “vibe coding” in the last couple of months, but there’s a lot of nonsense being said about this. In this post, I just want to share my thoughts about this subject.
So, what’s vibe coding anyways?
Vibe coding is letting AI Agents do all of your work. As simple as that. It is mainly done using tools like Cursor, Windsurft or Claude Code.
What’s the problem of it?
That’s where things start to get interesting. There’s nothing wrong with it, but a lot of people think it has. From 10 posts that mentioned vibe coding, I would say at least 9 are saying things like: “if you do this, you’ll forget how to code”, “this is not good, all this code is garbage”, “you cannot create anything by vibe coding”, “AI is bad at coding”. And honestly? They’re all wrong. Let’s start with the one I hate the most.
”If you do this, you’ll forget how to code”
This is exactly what people used to say when Fortran was revealed. “Now, you don’t need to code on Assembly or machine language, you can code using natural language and variables! Can you imagine that? No one is gonna know how a computer works anymore!” (just FYI, I wasn’t even close to be alive at this time, but I read this from people who were)
Now, can we all agree this didn’t happen, did it? We won’t forget how to code just because there’s an AI agent doing it all for us, because let’s be honest, as long as you don’t code in pure Assembly, you’re very very far from understanding what’s really happening behind the scenes, so what’s the difference? So… there’s is one big difference indeed.
The real issue with vibe coding
There’s a big difference with a person using AI just to make coding faster and easier and a person using AI because they don’t know anything that’s going on. Let’s imagine those two examples:
-
Person 1 asks Cursor to:
create a web app to do X thing
-
Person 2 asks Cursor to:
create a React version X app using Vite, Shadcn, with Tailwind, Zustand and react-query. Use composition pattern in component creating, put all business logic into custom hooks. Make the application acessible to screen readers, write tests using Jest and React Testing Library. Use Y app as example, make it look like this app was design by Z company. Write all the tests first, then start coding. The tests should look ensure the app will:
- Business rule 1
- Business rule 2
- Business rule 3
- Business rule 4
- … The app will be hosted on a ubuntu server machine I have here at home. Please include a Docker and docker compose files to ensure builds will work fine. Optimize the CI/CD pipeline for best performance.
There’s an INSANE difference between both. In the end, are they both “vibe coding”? Technically… yes? But you get the point. If you use AI to potentialize what you’re doing, only making it faster and easier, there’s no problem at all in doing this. Even in the example for Person 2, AI will probably make a lot of mistakes and write a ton of garbage code. But then you only need to fix small things. Also, you will know exactly all technologies AI used, and probably you will know how to fix them very quicky. I can guarantee the Person 1 in the example does not.
So, what’s your suggestion?
If you relate to Person 1 of the example: use AI to guide you, not to do everything. You can even prompt something like to this to any LLM: “I’m learning, so don’t give me the correct answer. Instead, give me some hints and try to make me find out myself. Help me getting there, but without taking decisions and doing things for me.” This works really well, I have done that multiple times. Use AI as your ally, not as an enemy and even worst: as a master.
If you relate to Person 2 of the example: just use AI. Seriously, it is just a tool. If you use a modern IDE and an interpreted programming language, what’s the problem of adding a new tool? Just keep in mind to don’t let AI take all decisions for you and you should be fine.