I had a strong stance against vibe coding. I felt like it would take away too much of the learning experience and would result in lots of bad code.
However I know realised how much faster you can move with it. I still believe you need to do the hard work, understand the code, learn about concepts and architecture. But vibe coding puts you in the position of a team manager who can give instructions and review code. The iteration speed just increases massively.
I think one just needs to keep an open mind about new tech and do the work testing if the new thing is useful for you.
If I had a AI robot build a dog house for me, I would not have much pride in the end product.
The other down side is AI seems to be a coding for money project. If one can afford the various subscriptions, they they can code. This is a big turn off for me.
I think it enables one to do a lot more than what would have been accomplished but not necessarily faster especially if it is to be a production app that would be maintained. If that isn't the goal, then it is faster. There was a recent article about this perception https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown
People still use the term "vibe coded" for any code the LLM wrote which is confusing.
It's not vibe coding to have the LLM write parts of your code, integrating it after careful review. Vibe coding is to not look at the produced code at all, and switching off your engineer brain completely, by blindly adopting anything the AI generates. This is mostly silly, if not done for pure hobbyist purposes.
I can of course imagine scenarios where you only need a minor tweak in an open-source app that you can just blindly get done with AI, but again that's not the heavy-lifting. It's like playing around with Wordpress themes at most.
And I don't need to keep hammering on this point really much, the results speak for themselves.
LLMs are really useful, and it will keep evolving, and we will keep using it in novel ways e.g. MCP.
However, for a piece software to be useful on the margins where ppl choose the best products, AI is going to merely raise expectations on quality.
Now, it might be the case that the verb "Vibing" will make it to common language to mean "I generated this code with an LLM" but this has not been its original meaning.
I am looking at it from a bit of a different perspective since I work in medicine. Maybe here the questions become even more blurred since the human factor is more in the foreground. That usually makes me think: AI is far from really taking over. Maybe that is my ego driven perspective and I will be proven wrong rather soon
I'm finding a nice middle ground of using Claude code + neovim without any auto complete tools.
To me it's a nice balance of "hey do this feature more me" but then any edits I want to do, I have to go in and understand the code and write things out. Still forces me to learn any new APIs I'm not familiar with.
Is it the fastest? No, but it's still allows me to move fast and continue to learn.
