Vibe Coding is just Coding
The future where vibe coding is just coding is coming faster than expected.
When I first came across vibe coding last year, I used to say, half-jokingly, ‘The term vibe coding will disappear and we’ll just call it coding.’ That moment has come sooner than I expected.
The way I write code hasn’t changed much since I started actively using AI. Have AI make a plan, refine it until it’s solid, execute, and review. There are hero stories floating around in communities about people running dozens of agents in parallel and churning out entire services like magic, but I doubt that approach actually produces anything useful, and I don’t trust code I haven’t reviewed myself. So whenever I tried a different method, I always came back to this plan-execute loop. I still can’t fully trust AI-generated code, and I need to understand the code to be able to modify it later.
For a while, I thought the majority opinion in the community and industry wasn’t far from mine, but recently I’ve started to notice some interesting changes.
Even just a few months ago, the prevailing view was ‘never fully trust AI-generated code,’ ‘reviewing AI-generated code is now the human developer’s job,’ and so on. But recently, I’ve started seeing opinions like ‘future AI will take care of technical debt’ or ‘be strict about specs and testing the product, not the code.’
These are still not the majority opinion, but I believe they are close to the truth. As LLMs have started building their own next generations, it’s clear that the pace of improvement will accelerate significantly. Before long, AI will produce results trustworthy enough that we won’t need to look at the code at all. At least, outputs that people trust — even if they aren’t actually trustworthy.
I always thought this future would come eventually, but as is always the case with technology, it’s arriving faster than expected. As a developer, I worry about losing the ability to trust what I build. But as someone who makes products, if I used to spend most of my time writing code, now I can focus on product design and testing the product itself — and maybe that means I can build something better.
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