Vibe Coding

Is Vibe Coding good or bad? Being active in open discussions for developers, you'd see a lot of people shipping out products left and right. Almost every day a product gets shipped. With the recent development in AI IDEs, shipping products couldn't be any easier.

'Vibe Coding'. 'Vibe Coding is a coined term widely used by indie hackers. It's 'where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists'. Honestly, that sounds like nightmare for senior developers (LMAO). Peter Thiels (@levelsio) shipped out a vibe-coded product in March which earned $47K MRR at the time of writing. Insane. He went out and vibe coded his multiplayer, threeJS web-based game 'fly.pieter.com'. Honestly, watching how he built it from scratch, is insane. Learned a lot from him on how to handle feedback and especially, how to build in public. But my question is, should everyone vibe code?

Aboslutely not. Vibe Coding is messy. I still argue you need to have developer skills to “vibe code” successfully. Ive seen people ship out with exposed DB auths, API keys, etc. I've seen an X account with 70k followers shipped out a 'vibe-coded' product with exposed supabase auth. I've seen projects that ship out inflated, unusable code. I've seen developers using AI wipe out their entire codebase because they don't know how to use git. It doesn't take a while for a developer to see these flaws. Developers are calling it out in public as well, publicly hacking and auditing sites. It's not all fun and games.

Don't get me wrong, AI is sooooo helpful. I integrate AI with my workflow as a developer. It's really good tech that I see myself using it everyday. It makes my work a lot faster.

I think people are using AI for the wrong reasons. Same with delegation, you should understand what you're delegating, especially with AI. AI sometimes hallucinates into giving you useless and dysfunctional code. It's your responsibility to learn first. There might be a time where AI does your job as a developer. I'm both happy and sad to say, that time is not now. I'm really optimistic about the future of AI and tech. But until that time comes when AI can one shot and create a Netflix / Facebook / Google application, learning how to code is still the number one priority as a developer.

TL;DR: Vibe Coding is good, to an extent. Learning how to code, fundamentally still has its benefits as a developer.

References:

• https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
• https://x.com/levelsio/status/1899596115210891751
• https://x.com/levelsio