What vibe coding is, and what I think about it

There’s a term going around right now— “vibe coding.” It means building software with the assistance of AI, where you describe what you want and the AI generates the code. You guide it, refine it, correct it. You’re less a typist and more a director. I’ve been doing this for a while, and I have some thoughts.

What it’s actually like

The honest version: it’s faster and weirder than I expected.

Faster, because you can go from idea to working prototype in an afternoon. Things that would have taken me days of looking up syntax, debugging, and rebuilding— they just… appear. That’s genuinely useful. Weirder, because it asks something different of you. You have to be really clear about what you want. If you’re vague, you get something vague back. And you have to be able to evaluate what you get— to know when it’s wrong, even if you couldn’t have written the right version yourself.

That second part is, I think, the real skill. It’s not about prompting. It’s about judgment.

What it’s changed for me

It’s made me faster at prototyping. I no longer avoid building something just because it would take a long time to code from scratch. That’s removed a lot of friction between having an idea and seeing whether the idea is actually good. It’s also made me think differently about what “knowing how to code” means. You still need to understand what’s possible, what the code is doing, and whether the output makes sense. But the bar has shifted. Knowing the syntax matters less than knowing the concept.

What it doesn’t replace

Good judgment. Knowing what to build in the first place. Being able to catch when something looks right but behaves wrong. It also doesn’t replace actually caring about the craft. The AI doesn’t have opinions about whether something is good. That part is still on you.

The Lab

I’ve started keeping a section on this site called the “Lab”. It’s where I put the things built this way. VibeLoop was the first one. There’ll be more.

If you’re curious: visit the Lab →