Vibe Coding: Between Hype and Doubt

Coding with vibe, it's a new trend that's sweeping through the dev community fast. And there are a lot of opinions about it. Of course, I have an opinion too, but right now it's one that shifts with the wind. I just want to write it off my chest, because currently, it's bubbling in my stomach with quite some uncertainty.

Vibe coding. Sounds fancy, right? In practice, it means: you throw an idea at an AI, and it spits out code like it's nothing. No more slogging through for-loops or if-statements (because yes, that's real slogging, uhu). Just... pass along your 'vibe' and hope the AI gets what you mean.

Vibe coding feels a bit like Dreamweaver 2.0. Back then you dragged blocks over a screen and just hoped no pure garbage HTML came out.

Now? You just whisper: "make me a fancy login page, kinda TikTok style", and boom, code appears. If you’re lucky, the magic is included like you’re a Make-A-Wish kid.

Some people back then still learned how HTML actually worked, simply by misusing Dreamweaver like an early YouTube tutorial. Or like we now use Copilot or Stack Overflow.

Not long ago, I saw online (was it Imgur? or something else? Who cares.) an LLM turning a chaotic sketch into a real website. Back then, still future talk. And yeah, it surprised me.

That was then.
Now? Semi-developers get pissed when it doesn’t work. Because vibe coding is becoming the new normal. (This sounds judgmental, but it’s not.)

If you don't know what your Cursor or Lovable is doing, you also don't know if it's doing it right. Many technical steps the app takes are incomprehensible for noobs people who don't know much about it. With consequences like private keys no longer being private. Also, proper frameworks, which could help with default security, are rarely used for your web app.

And after a while, you run into the fact that the LLM is limited to a specific context. It no longer knows that some components exist. As a result, it does it differently, redoes it, duplicates work, makes it less performant, ...

Vibe Pressure is a term I came up with myself and it exists in two directions: left and right! (That's a reference to the Dutch version of Halloween with Witch Hazel from the Looney Tunes. For the three people who get this reference: I salute you.)

I feel pressure to use Co-pilot, Cursor, Chat GPT to stay relevant. You get more hammered by the quote "AI won't take your job. Someone using AI will." than there are Spider-Man universes. So yes, after hearing that quote for the 100th time, you think "I need to be on top of this".

Uncertainly, you follow AI evolution closely and keep using new tools. And yes, they massively boost my productivity. I feel a bit like Peter Paul Rubens directing a bunch of students, improving and training them to implement my work as best as possible. You can kind of see it like a paid internship, but without the long wait for results.

This philosophy fits very strongly with my ideology that developers will evolve more and more into Quality Assurance Engineers and Project Managers, but still ultimately act as the artist. Or you could simply say "artist". Because that's what we really are: artists! Bring on those copyright royalties!

This is my biggest insecurity when talking with my peers about my work. I mean people, friends and developers I look up to. I feel less valuable if I can't 100% honestly say "I made this". Because... I didn't really completely make it myself. Right? Or did I? In this side of it, I give myself over even more to imposter syndrome than I already did. I know it.

But it does have a grain of truth. Right? Because maybe I said in two sentences what I wanted a feature to do. Or how something should look. Or how my idea came to life. Even though I pay for some dev tools. Even though I use some compilers that I could never build myself. Even though I use other people's code to solve my bugs.

The moral balance is still somewhere I haven’t been. And that's because of a lot of pressure in my environment.

Maybe it’s not about who writes the code. But about who lies awake at night because of it.

No idea if you find any grounding in this blog. I don't know myself yet. But I still wanted to plant the seed.