How would you define vibe coding? I see it as a combination of building something you couldn't realistically create using the traditional process and not caring much about code quality or long-term maintainability. I'm also wondering whether there's a meaningful difference between an experienced engineer quickly prototyping with AI and someone without programming experience asking AI to build an entire application.
4 Answers
The key distinction is whether you understand and review what gets produced. An experienced engineer might give an AI a proper specification, inspect the result, test it, and revise the design. Someone vibe coding may simply ask for an app, see that it appears to work, and move on without understanding the implementation.
Vibe coding is mainly about skipping the usual requirements, constraints, design decisions, and understanding of execution. You describe the desired outcome, let the model produce something, test it casually, and keep prompting it to fix whatever breaks. It can be fast for small experiments, but the result may be fundamentally fragile.
That approach makes sense for a small project where occasional failure doesn’t matter, but I wouldn’t use it for professional software or anything critical.
I’d define it as using AI to generate code without reading or evaluating the output. The issue isn’t AI assistance itself; it’s switching off your judgment and treating the generated source as a black box. That can be acceptable for a disposable personal project, but it’s risky for anything important.
I don’t think it necessarily means being unprofessional or inexperienced. AI-assisted development can still be disciplined: start with a plan, check the architecture, review the generated code, and take responsibility for maintaining it. “Vibe coding” is the more hands-off version where the apparent result matters more than how it was built.
The final result can be very different depending on whether the person is capable of reviewing the code before releasing it.