LinkedIn and Twitter are basically unusable right now. Most of my feed is “AI is replacing devs” or FOMO like “if you’re not vibe coding, you’re falling behind.”
It’s annoying.
Yes, most developers use AI autocomplete, chatbots, and some agentic tools here and there. It’s great. SuperMaven, Copilot, and tools like these are incredibly cool and useful. But I feel like there are tools that are not THAT useful to build production software.
Vibe coding...
Vibe coding hype is getting out of hand. I’ve visited a few AI and vibe coding communities and meetups over the past few weeks and months, and one thing became clear: the people most hyped about vibe coding are usually either:
Working at an AI startup (using the hype to sell their tools)
Not working on production code (so they don’t care if someone hacks their system or the app falls apart in a month because they likely won't be working on it by then).
What "production" means in this context is a whole other discussion.(For example, I don’t consider a vibe-coded ChatGPT wrapper recipe app with five users and zero revenue a production app, at most, it’s an MVP).
Vibe coding is the future? Cool, then I'll vibe code IN the future
When I talked to "vibe coding is the future" people, I was genuinely curious and eager to learn. I thought I was missing something big about building software with AI. I tried vibe coding and it couldn't produce high quality and maintainable code. How are you going to build real-world applications if the code is a mess? I figured maybe I just hadn't learned the right trick yet.
What I found instead was that most people vibe code hobby projects, MVPs, personal apps, etc... Not real-word or "production-grade" apps. Don’t get me wrong, these are great use cases. But the hype around them feels waaaay overblown.
I genuinely wanted to see if there was something more substantial than my current AI workflow. There wasn't.
AI-assisted coding workflows are great
I use chatbots to understand codebases, learn faster, and explain concepts. If I don’t trust the output, I Google it. It works really well. I use Copilot, SuperMaven, and other autocomplete tools and they are honestly the biggest AI improvement for me. I also use agentic coding sometimes. Once in a while, I let it generate 100 lines of code, I skim it, check that it is understandable and correct, commit it, and move on. I can still defend the code in review if needed.
Staying curious
But I still want to talk to more people who think vibe coding is the future for high-quality maintainable apps. Because I don’t fully get their thinking. For example, someone told me (a rather important person in the space I'd say) they imagine a future where you just vibe code, make pull requests without looking at the code, and if something goes wrong, like maybe the AI deletes your folders or pushes secrets to a public GitHub repo etc.. you are (the human) NOT the one responsible for the mistake because you just "push a button."
That was such a wild thing to hear. Like, are you going to blame the AI? How does that work?
My gameplan going forward
I avoid Linkedin and other work-related socials as much as I can to avoid the hype. In the meanwhile I continue learning how to use AI to build great software.
"Boring and old" tech is best
My other approach is to stick with safe and "boring" technologies like PostgreSQL, Django, etc... They work, are actually "production-grade" and they run real businesses. LLMs, even out of the box, work very well with them because there is so much content online, like tutorials, blog posts etc about these technologies. I will keep using these "boring" tools with AI and hope the hype dies down soon so we can have grounded conversations about reality instead of a future (where you don't need to write code anymore to produce high-quality software) that isn't here yet and that nobody knows when it will arrive.
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