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.
Sounds great, right? Get paid while the model does the thinking?
Except it's not that simple.
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 actually pretty useful for:
- Boilerplate - Nobody wants to write their 5000th CRUD endpoint by hand
- Test data - Generating mock data beats typing it manually
- Learning - Watching AI generate code in a language you're learning is like having a tutor
- Ideas - Sometimes it suggests approaches you wouldn't have thought of. It's read more Stack Overflow than you have.
These are all legitimate uses. The problem is when you let it think for you completely.
AI is a tool, not your replacement
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 modify heavily
- Explain unfamiliar concepts or code
- Handle tedious stuff
- Get unstuck when they're banging their head against a wall
But they're still doing the thinking. The architecture. The creative problem solving. 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 time! But the bill shows up somewhere else: code quality, security holes the AI didn't think about, bugs that only surface in production because it didn't understand your use case. Or 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. Don't let your skills rust.
Vibe coding looks comfortable: you get paid while AI does your job. But the better goal is getting good enough that AI becomes a power tool instead of a crutch.
Now excuse me while I ask Claude how to center a div.