Anyone can vibe-code. And personally, I think that’s what makes this era of development so exciting. From an accessibility standpoint, we’ve shifted from needing to know syntax to just needing an idea.
That’s what makes it powerful, and it’s also what makes it dangerous.
The yin and the yang, if you will.
Which is why I’ve shifted from saying that “I vibe-code” to saying I use AI-assisted development.
I stopped thinking of myself as the author of code and started thinking of myself as an orchestrator of systems.
The Concern
Talking to traditional developers every day, it’s clear that vibe-coding raises real concerns: security concerns, reliability concerns, and scaling concerns.
Systems Orchestration, or AI-assisted development, exists to make those risks someone else’s problem by placing real systems, real APIs, and real authority behind AI-generated software.
This isn’t “rolling your own auth.” It’s making sure you’re not rebuilding the wheel while the car is already moving.
We’ve all seen the articles. We’ve all seen the memes. They point to the same anxiety about vibe-coding: that it feels unserious.
“Claude deleted my entire database!”
“Users can see other users’ data!”
To sidestep these concerns, it’s best to build your application on top of existing, battle-tested architecture rather than trying to invent everything yourself.
Plenty of platforms already enable this: Supabase, n8n, Xano, and many others.
The singularity?
Sure, Linus Torvalds may have shifted public perception dramatically, with some calling it “the singularity.”
But, not everyone is a master developer responsible for the foundation of the modern internet. Vibe-coding looks very different when you’re Linus Torvalds than when you’re building your first product.
At its extreme, vibe-coding means trusting the output blindly and letting the AI sculpt your project with minimal oversight.
Systems Orchestration is different. It means keeping your hands on the steering wheel, understanding the system beneath you, and having confidence in the platform you’re building on top of.
Whether people call it AI-assisted development or pure vibe-coding, I think the deeper shift is toward Systems Orchestration.
What this actually looks like
A clear analogy is payments.
No sane startup says, “We’ll build our own PCI-compliant payment system from scratch.” Even brilliant engineers don’t try to roll their own fraud detection, card vaulting, or regulatory compliance.
Instead, they use something like Stripe, because Stripe’s entire business is being correct, auditable, and battle-tested in ways a single product team never could be.
Systems Orchestration works the same way.
The AI can design experiences, propose workflows, and orchestrate actions, but the heavy lifting around security, data integrity, identity, and compliance lives in a dedicated platform built specifically for that purpose.
You still build the product. You just don’t gamble with the foundations.
So to me, vibe-coding hasn’t disappeared — it’s evolved.
Vibe-coding is still the creative spark: the place where ideas are free, messy, fast, and expressive.
Systems Orchestration is what comes next: the discipline that takes those ideas and routes them through real systems, real APIs, and real authority so they can survive in the real world.
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