Becoming a Better Developer with Vibe Coding

There's an unfortunate stereotype with vibe coders these days; quite a number will argue that vibe coders don't really care about software craft, maintenance, bug fixing and the other nuances that come with building quality software.

As someone who's been writing code for over a decade, my primary tool of trade has been fullstack TypeScript (with Angular on the UI). However, I've always wanted to build side projects in other languages or frameworks that I considered interesting:

• Realtime applications with Erlang/Elixir OTP
• UI applications in React
• Web scraping & data analytics with Python...etc

With life and other commitments, it can really be difficult to pull these off as it does take significant amount of time to learn new cognitive skills. With vibe coding, I feel excited to kickstart these projects once again.

My approach however won't be to just blindly trust the AI to deliver the code based on my prompts alone. I intend to also use this opportunity to learn from the generated code. As a general rule, I always try to ask the AI what the code is intended to do and why it was done in that way. Here are other ways vibe coding can make you a better developer:

• Ask the AI to create the generated pseudocode from time to time instead of just going straight to the "answer".
• If learning a new syntax, ask the AI to translate the code to language or framework you're familiar with. For instance, for a piece of Elixir code I can ask the AI agent how this could be done in Angular. This way I get to bring it to a world I'm more familiar with.
• If possible, follow a TDD (Test Driven Development) approach where you tell the AI to generate tests before writing the business logic. This way you get to actually know what your logic is intended to do.