How would you define "vibe coding"? To me, it seems to involve two things: building something in a way you couldn't have managed with older tools, and accepting a low standard of quality or long-term maintainability. I also wonder whether there's a meaningful difference between an experienced engineer quickly prototyping with AI and someone with little programming knowledge asking AI to build an entire application without understanding the result.
5 Answers
The key distinction is whether the generated code is actually reviewed and understood. An experienced engineer might give an AI a detailed specification, inspect the output, test it, and make the necessary design decisions. Someone vibe coding usually accepts “it seems to work” without checking how it works or whether it will hold up later.
I’d define it as using AI to generate code while treating the source files like black boxes. You describe the desired outcome, run the result, feed errors back into the model, and keep iterating without really reading or taking responsibility for the implementation. That can be perfectly reasonable for a disposable personal project, but it’s risky for anything important.
A simple definition would be: telling an AI what you want, accepting whatever it produces, and taking little or no responsibility for understanding it. Whether that’s acceptable depends on the stakes. It may be fine for a quick experiment or a private tool, but it’s a poor approach for production systems, critical infrastructure, or software that other people will depend on.
Some people use the term for any AI-generated code, but that seems too broad. If you can review the output, explain its behavior, test it properly, and rewrite the weak parts, that’s better described as AI-assisted programming. “Vibe coding” is the extreme end where the process is driven by trial and error and the code is never seriously examined.
Vibe coding is less about whether AI was involved and more about skipping the engineering process: requirements, constraints, architecture, security, testing, and maintainability. AI-assisted development is not automatically careless. The problem is turning off your judgment and accepting code simply because the demo works.
That doesn’t necessarily make AI-assisted work unprofessional. Professional teams can use AI, provided they still apply normal review and engineering standards.
Exactly. The final result can be very different even when both people start by asking AI to build the same kind of app.