What Is Vibe Coding, Really? My Take After 8 Months of Living in It
I have been building with AI tools for 8 months. I shipped 3 products, broke 2 codebases, and changed my definition of “vibe coding” four times. Here is what it actually means when I strip the hype away.
What does vibe coding actually mean in practice?
Vibe coding means describing what you want in plain English and having an AI write the code. Andrej Karpathy coined the term in early 2025. It caught fire because it flips the traditional skill hierarchy — you no longer need to know syntax before you can build. I started with zero Python experience. I built a Stripe integration before I knew what a foreign key was. That is the point.
The common framing is wrong. People say “vibe coding is just prompting.” It is not. I wrote 50 bad prompts before I learned the skill is about breaking your idea into testable chunks and verifying each one. I wasted 3 days on a feature because I wrote a single giant prompt. The AI generated 400 lines. Half was wrong. Now I prompt one function at a time and test after every function. My failure rate dropped from 60% to 15%.
My flow: 1) Describe one function in one sentence. 2) Let AI generate it. 3) Review every line. 4) Write a quick test. 5) Run it. 6) Fix AI mistakes. 7) Commit. Each cycle takes 10 minutes. In a 2-hour session I get 8-12 features. The bottleneck shifted from writing code to reviewing code. That took me 2 months to get used to.
Most people fail at vibe coding because they treat the AI like a senior engineer. They write vague prompts and expect production code. Treat it like a junior developer instead. Give it detailed specs. Review its output. Tell it what to fix. I get 3x better results with specific prompts than with clever prompts. Specificity beats creativity every time.
Who is vibe coding actually for?
The marketing says “anyone can build anything.” That is a lie. Vibe coding works best for three groups. Non-technical founders who need an MVP to show investors. Experienced developers who want to ship faster by delegating boilerplate. Solo builders who hate frontend and need AI to write the CSS they cannot be bothered with.
I do NOT recommend vibe coding for: security-critical apps, regulated industries, or anything handling sensitive user data. I found a SQL injection vulnerability in my own code after 3 months. I did not write it — the AI did. But I shipped it. That is on me.
What does a real vibe coding session look like?
I open Cursor. My .cursorrules file tells the AI my project structure. I type “create a user registration endpoint with email verification and a rate limit of 5 attempts per hour.” The AI writes the route, the model, the email template, and the rate limiter. I review every line. I catch 2-3 logic errors per session on average.
The flow: prompt, review, test, fix, commit. Each cycle takes 10-15 minutes for a small feature. I spend more time reading AI output now than writing my own code. That took 2 months to get used to. But my shipping speed is now 3x what it was before AI tools.
I am building [project type]. I need to implement [specific feature]. Here are constraints: [tech stack, libraries, file structure]. Write only the implementation. Do not explain the code. I will review each function after you write it. Start with the model layer first.
Why do people disagree about what vibe coding means?
There is a split. Some say vibe coding is the end of traditional software engineering. Others call it a fad that produces unmaintainable garbage. Both are wrong. I sent a PR to a friend’s repo. He rejected it. “This code looks AI-generated. The architecture is inconsistent.” He was right. I was so focused on shipping that I let the AI define the structure. The code worked. It was not maintainable.
My conclusion: vibe coding is a productivity layer, not a replacement for engineering judgment. You still need to know what good code looks like. You still need to understand race conditions and SQL injection and rate limiting. The AI writes the instructions. You are still the architect.
You are an experienced senior developer. Write clean, modular code. Use TypeScript. Prefer functional over OOP. Every function must have a single responsibility. Import types explicitly. Do not add dependencies without asking. Write tests for every function. Use async/await, not promises. Log at every entry point. Handle errors with try/catch.