Incompetence as a Virtue

Incompetence as a Virtue

Lately, the figure of the vibe coder has become trendy. But what is it, really?

Vibe coding is a technique that generates code from natural language descriptions. It’s a revolutionary system that greatly simplifies application development, but it's important to be cautious about misleading promises.

First of all, the “vibe coder engineer” doesn’t exist — what we have are software engineers who use AI tools as support. That’s a much more efficient way to explore and make the most of even less familiar technologies.

Still, there's a fundamental point to keep in mind: the end result must work. And that’s very difficult if the person using these tools has no idea what is actually being produced. Software development is a complex process; for a program to behave as expected, it must be defined clearly and precisely. And even that’s a challenge, because the human brain has its limits.

AI generates code. And while its processing power far will surpass that of the human brain — especially in terms of raw calculation speed — it still follows instructions provided by people. Those instructions need to be consistent and unambiguous, otherwise the AI begins to “interpret.” Sometimes it even succeeds. The real problem arises when the output doesn’t match the original intent.

If the user can’t evaluate what the AI has produced, they’ll be forced to accept it as good enough… only to complain later when it doesn’t work as expected.

Here lies a widespread ambiguity: not caused by AI’s limitations, but by the flawed mindset people bring to using it. AI doesn’t read minds (assuming those minds are even clear to their owners). It does what it’s told. If you don’t know what you’re telling it, that’s a potential issue. If you can’t assess whether the output matches what you expected, then it becomes a real problem.

And so we get the “super vibe coders,” asking AI to build things vaguely and superficially — then complaining when they don’t work.

There’s no such thing as a “vibe coding expert.” There are just experts. People who know how to effectively use AI technologies to learn and grow, and who can guide their results with more impact and clarity than ever before.