AI-assisted coding trumps vibe coding
Being an AI evolutionist rather than revolutionist, I have refrained myself from posting too much about AI - a lot of people are doing so by the way, I very much doubt you’re missing my opinion.
But, I recently got back from Pycon Italy and I realized one thing: everybody uses AI at work. This includes me.
At the same time, in a professional software development context, nobody gives a f- about vibe coding.
The name is cool, but the idea of leaving the AI do the all the dirty work is just silly. And, despite the hype, this is very clear to all software professionals. AI provides a lot of value right now, but generating working software from natural language requirements seems a worse version of the classical “just get a bunch of juniors to get this job done” disaster.
Properly using AI to enhance our coding is a deeply intellectual exercise and it’s high time we recognize it as such. Insisting on cherry-picked examples where “vibe coding created my app even if I don’t know how to program” is pretty pointless - for a professional programmer. I’ll let other people, who haven’t experienced the magic feeling of something you create coming to life, or have stopped doing so, rely on vibe coding. It’s great for prototyping, or for designers, or for examples.
I’ll keep using AI as one of the many tools I have, as a professional developer, to improve my work, just as compilers, linters, IDEs, new languages and libraries.
