Originally published at https://blog.akshatuniyal.com.
Let me be honest with you. A few weeks ago, I was at a tech meetup and an old colleague walked up to me, eyes lit up, and said — “Bro, I’ve been vibe coding all week. Built an entire app. Zero lines of code written by me.” And I nodded along, the way you do when you don’t want to be the one who kills the mood at a party.
But on my drive back, I couldn’t stop thinking — do we actually know what we’re talking about when we say “vibe coding”? Or have we collectively decided that saying it confidently is enough?
Spoiler: it’s a bit of both. And that, my friend, is exactly why we need to talk about it.
” A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” — Alexander Pope
So… what actually is vibe coding?
The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy — one of the original minds behind Tesla’s Autopilot and a co-founder of OpenAI — in early 2025. He described it as a way of coding where you essentially forget that code exists. You talk to an AI, describe what you want, accept whatever it spits out, and keep nudging it until things more or less work. You don’t read the code. You don’t understand it. You just… vibe.
That’s the origin. Clean, honest, almost playful in its admission.
What it has become, however, is a whole different story. Today, “vibe coding” is used to mean everything from “I used ChatGPT to write a Python script” to “I’m building a SaaS startup entirely on AI-generated code without a single developer on my team.” The term has been stretched so thin you could see through it.
The good stuff — and yes, there genuinely is some
Let’s not be cynical for the sake of it. Vibe coding has real, tangible benefits and dismissing them would be intellectually dishonest.
Speed. If you have an idea and want to see it alive in an afternoon, vibe coding is astonishing. What used to take a developer two weeks — setting up boilerplate, writing CRUD operations, designing basic UI flows — can now be prototyped in hours. For founders validating an idea, for designers who want a clickable demo, for someone just experimenting on a weekend, this is genuinely magical.
The gates are finally open. For years, building software was gated behind years of learning. Vibe coding has cracked that gate open. A small business owner can now build their own inventory tracker. A teacher can create a custom quiz app for their class. That’s not nothing — that’s actually huge.
The boring work goes away. Even seasoned developers will tell you — a lot of coding is tedious. Writing the same kind of functions over and over, setting up configs, writing boilerplate. AI handles this now. That’s time freed up for actual thinking.
” Necessity is the mother of invention. And honestly, laziness might be the father.” — Plato
Now let’s talk about what nobody wants to say out loud
Here’s where I’ll risk being unpopular.
You can’t debug what you don’t understand. When something breaks — and it will break — you’re standing in front of a wall of code you’ve never read, written by an AI that doesn’t actually know what your product is supposed to do. Good luck. I’ve spoken to founders who’ve spent more time untangling AI-generated spaghetti than it would have taken to build the thing properly in the first place.
Security is not vibing along with you. AI models are optimised to produce code that works — not code that’s safe. SQL injections, exposed API keys, missing authentication checks — these aren’t hypothetical. They’re the kind of things that don’t show up until your users’ data is already gone. And the person who vibe-coded the app has no idea where to even look.
The junior developer problem. This one keeps me up at night a little. There’s a generation of aspiring developers right now who are using AI to skip the part where you struggle through understanding fundamentals. The struggle, as annoying as it is, is where you actually learn. If you never write a for-loop from scratch, you don’t truly understand iteration. And if you don’t understand iteration, you can’t reason about performance. It’s turtles all the way down.
It scales terribly. A vibe-coded MVP is one thing. A vibe-coded product with real users, real data, real edge cases? That’s where the cracks start showing — loudly. What AI produces is rarely modular, rarely maintainable, and almost never documented. When you need to hand it off to a real developer, they will look at you with a very specific expression. You’ll know it when you see it.
” All that glitters is not gold.” — William Shakespeare
So who is vibe coding actually for?
Honestly? It depends entirely on what you’re building and why.
If you’re a solo founder trying to test whether your idea has legs before investing real money — vibe code away. Build it fast and don’t worry about making it perfect. Show it to ten people. If they love it, then bring in someone who can build it properly.
If you’re an experienced developer who understands the code being generated and is using AI to move faster — that’s not even really vibe coding, that’s just good engineering with better tools.
But if you’re building something that handles real money, real health data, real people’s privacy — please, for everyone’s sake, don’t just vibe your way through it.
The bottom line
Vibe coding is not a revolution. It’s also not a scam. It’s a tool — a genuinely powerful one — that is being wildly overhyped by people who want to believe that building software is now as easy as having a conversation. Sometimes it is. More often, it isn’t.
The best way I can put it: vibe coding is like driving with GPS. It gets you there faster, and most of the time it works brilliantly. But if you’ve never learned to read a map, the day the signal drops, you’re completely lost.
Learn the fundamentals. Use the AI. And always remember —
” There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” — Beverly Sills
About the Author
Akshat Uniyal writes about Artificial Intelligence, engineering systems, and practical technology thinking.
Explore more articles at https://blog.akshatuniyal.com.
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