"Vibe coding" is the hottest trend in tech. You type a prompt, AI writes the code, and you ship it without fully understanding what happened.
Sounds amazing, right? Here's why it's actually dangerous.
What Is Vibe Coding?
Term coined by Andrej Karpathy. It means using AI to write code based on vibes — you describe what you want, accept the output, and move on. No deep understanding required.
Why It's Popular
- Speed — Ship features in hours, not days
- Accessibility — Non-coders can build apps
- Dopamine — Instant results feel amazing
The Hidden Dangers
1. You Can't Debug What You Don't Understand
When your AI-generated code breaks at 3 AM in production, and you have no idea how it works — what do you do? Call ChatGPT?
2. Security Vulnerabilities
AI models are trained on public code, including insecure code. SQL injection, XSS, improper auth — AI doesn't always catch these.
3. Technical Debt Bomb
Vibe-coded projects accumulate debt at an insane rate. No architecture. No patterns. Just prompt after prompt stacked on top of each other.
4. Career Ceiling
If your only skill is prompting AI, you're replaceable by anyone with a keyboard. Real engineers understand systems.
The Right Way to Use AI
- Use AI as a co-pilot, not autopilot
- Read every line AI generates
- Understand the architecture first, then use AI for implementation
- Write tests — AI is great at writing tests
- Learn fundamentals. They never go out of style.
My Approach
I use Claude Code and Cursor every day. But I understand every line. I review every PR. And I can build the same thing from scratch if needed.
That's the difference between a developer who uses AI and a prompter who hopes for the best.
What's your take on vibe coding? Useful tool or dangerous shortcut? Comment below.
Top comments (3)
Test Driven Development is more important in vibe coding, also the fundamental strong concept. Nor do not need to check every code lines which you deliver, because you don't need to know a target programming language, in my example I just have a partial knowledge of rust and finnaly the binary is wasm + js/html. You need to know how your code is work, and where is the problematic parts.
Time to time ask AI analyze your code.
Last advice: Do not use any dependency.
I think that everyone should vibe code something into a dumpster fire: it is the fastest way to understand the downfalls. Also, TDD is not enough unless you have adversarial AI writing independent tests for another AI to pass. When I tried TDD the AI happily rewrote the tests to match the new code that it wrote.
There are ways to do it to avoid most of the problems you mention. Using two models, one to check up / critique the other works really well for starters. I've recently created applications in languages I understand very well and the outcome was pretty great. AI is also constantly improving.