Let me ask you this then: would you vibe code “critical” software? Software that NEEDS to work. If you wouldn’t, would you try to hire a senior engineer that knows this particular domain in and out, or would you hire a college grad with AI skills?
Discussion
For now I would definitely hire a human. Or, at least have a human audit a vibe coded version before relying on it fully. But if I needed something as a quick workaround, I wouldn’t care how it was made as long as there’s time for pro to look under the hood.
I would not vibe code anything that deals with people directly putting their money into it. If it’s an integration with another service that handles the money then fine, but I would not trust any vibe coded solution to handle money.
I am glad you came to that conclusion; I was worried there for a second!
See, I want to be that “pro” and I believe to become such a person, you simply cant embrace the vibe and instead sit down and actually learn how stuff works.
Again, I am not saying that you can’t use AI. It’s a great tool to do research and dig through knowledge. But building projects is a great way to learn software engineering. Letting AI do this for you takes away from the learning experience.
Don't even understand why we would go as far as critical software.
I haven't ever seen any vibe-coded software in production that is more than a hobby project.
The error vibe coders make is thinking that you don't really need human understanding to write code that works in reality. I would stop wasting my time with sweating over learning new programming stuff if that was even just directionally true.
But it's not. Perhaps some day we will get there, with a different technology. But LLMs will never replace the need for human understanding. They are really useful to bounce off and refine ideas, and learn/look things up much faster than googling stuff. That is still far off though, and ppl don't appreciate how amazing human beings are, if they don't realize the huge gap.
No one needs talk big about vibe coding. Just demonstrate your work. Publish your app and we'll see.