There's this trend going around called "vibe coding". Maybe you saw it on Reddit between doomscrolling sessions, or watched ThePrimeagen speedrun a game in 7 days using it. Basically, you let AI do all the actual coding while you just... vibe. Throw prompts at ChatGPT or Claude, lean back in your chair, and watch the robots do your job.
Get paid while the model does the thinking. What could go wrong?
The problem with just vibing
If you only vibe-code, your skills rot. Fast.
You're not building any intuition when AI writes everything, no patterns, no muscle memory. One day you'll realize you can't write a basic for-loop without asking an AI for help. I've seen it happen.
Plus, you lose understanding of your own codebase. AI writes syntactically correct code, sure. But it doesn't know your business context. It doesn't know why that auth system is built weird, or what edge cases caused three production incidents last year. When (not if) things break, what are you gonna do? Ask the AI to debug code you don't understand?
Good luck explaining to your manager why prod is down and you can't fix it because "Claude isn't responding."
Okay but AI isn't all bad
I'm not completely anti-AI. It's genuinely useful for boilerplate, because nobody wants to write their 5000th CRUD endpoint by hand. Same for mock data, which beats typing it out yourself. When you're learning a new language, watching it generate code is like having a tutor sitting next to you. And sometimes it suggests an approach you wouldn't have thought of, since it's read more Stack Overflow than you ever will.
All fine. The problem starts when you let it do the thinking entirely.
Nail guns and carpenters
To me, AI is like power tools for carpenters.
A nail gun doesn't make you less of a carpenter. It just means you can focus on the actual craftsmanship instead of hammering nails all day. But you still need to know which nails to use, where they go, and how to build something that won't collapse.
Best developers I know use AI to generate starting points they then rework heavily, to explain unfamiliar code, to chew through tedious stuff, and to get unstuck after an hour of banging their head against a wall. But the thinking stays theirs, the architecture stays theirs, and they understand every line that goes to prod.
Nothing's actually free
Remember TANSTAAFL? "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." Also called Crane's law.
AI coding looks free. You save so much time! But the bill shows up somewhere else: in code quality, in security holes the AI didn't think about, in bugs that only surface in production because it didn't understand your use case. Or in your own skills quietly degrading.
Also, the ethical thing: that code suggestion came from millions of developers' work, often without permission. Then again, before AI everyone was already copying from Stack Overflow anyway.
So what now?
Master the fundamentals before you start depending on AI, and never blindly accept its code. Ever. Give it proper context, because specific prompts get better results, and let it handle the boring stuff while you do the interesting work.
And keep coding without it sometimes, so your skills don't rust.
Vibe coding looks comfortable. You get paid while AI does your job. But the better goal is getting good enough that AI becomes your nail gun instead of your crutch.
Now excuse me while I ask Claude how to center a div.