With vibe coding you treat AI like a vending machine: insert prompt, receive answer, move on. It encourages a surface-level understanding of the code being generated. This might be ideal for quick prototyping or making your first steps in programming, but it rarely scales, and there’s a big chance that it hides technical debt or subtle bugs that only emerge in real-world production environments.
You wouldn’t trust and pay for a human developer who said, “I didn’t run the code, but I feel like it’s right.” Why should it be different with AI then?
That’s why AI-assisted development is a skill. A skill that effectively requires:
- Clear prompting – describing the problem and context accurately
- Critical thinking – evaluating the output as you would do from a junior dev
- Domain expertise – knowing when the output is nonsense (and it happens)
- Iteration – refining prompts and code until it works and actually still keep making sense
If anything, working with AI has made me a better engineer. It helps me move faster, yes, but also think more clearly about my code. It’s like pair programming with an infinitely patient, always available, assisting co-worker who doesn’t run on coffee. But the key word is assisting because I’m still in the driver’s seat.
TL;DR
If you’re using AI to write code, don’t just vibe. Validate. Test. Understand.
Good code doesn’t come from vibes, it comes from effort, iteration, and understanding. Programming using AI is a real game-changer, but only if you know how to use it in the right way.
