When I first read the term vibe coding, I first thought of headphones, chill music and transitioning into flow. The absolute state of creativity that programmers chase. A rush of productivity. But no, it became clear to me quite quickly that it was about something else.
Vibe coding is the name given to what you enter into an AI via the prompt in order to get a usable program. The output of the Large Language Model (LLM) is not yet the executable program, but rather just the corresponding source text in the programming language that the Vibe Coder specifies. Therefore, depending on which platform it is on, the Vibe Coder still needs the ability to make the whole thing work.
Since I’ve been active in IT, the salespeople’s dream has been there: You no longer need programmers to develop applications for customers. So far, all approaches of this kind have been less than successful, because no matter what you did, there was no solution that worked completely without programmers. A lot has changed since the general availability of AI systems and it is only a matter of time before LLM systems such as Copilot etc. also deliver executable applications.
The possibilities that Vibe Coding opens up are quite remarkable if you know what you are doing. Straight from Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, who was no longer able to master the spirits he summoned. Are programmers now becoming obsolete? In the foreseeable future, I don’t think the programming profession will die out. But a lot will change and the requirements will be very high.
I can definitely say that I am open to AI assistance in programming. However, my experiences so far have taught me to be very careful about what the LLMs suggest as a solution. Maybe it’s because my questions were very specific and for specific cases. The answers were occasionally a pointer in a possible direction that turned out to be successful. But without your own specialist knowledge and experience, all of the AI’s answers would not have been usable. Justifications or explanations should also be treated with caution in this context.
There are now various offers that want to teach people how to use artificial intelligence. So in plain language, how to formulate a functioning prompt. I think such offers are dubious, because the LLMs were developed to understand natural (human) language. So what should you learn to formulate complete and understandable sentences?
Anyone who creates an entire application using Vibe Coding must test it extensively. So click through the functions and see if everything works as it should. This can turn into a very annoying activity that becomes more annoying with each run.
The use of programs created by Vibe Coding is also unproblematic as long as they run locally on your own computer and are not freely accessible as a commercial Internet service. Because this is exactly where the danger lurks. The programs created by Vibe Coding are not sufficiently protected against hacker attacks, which is why they should only be operated in closed environments. I can also well imagine that in the future the use of programs that are Vibe Coded will be prohibited in security-critical environments such as authorities or banks. As soon as the first cyber attacks on company networks through Vibe coding programs become known, the bans are in place.
Besides the question of security for Vibe Coding applications, modifications and extensions will be extremely difficult to implement. This phenomenon is well-known in software development and occurs regularly with so-called legacy applications. As soon as you hear that something has grown organically over time, you’re already in the thick of it. A lack of structure and so-called technical debt cause a project to erode over time to such an extent that the impact of changes on the remaining functionality becomes very difficult to assess. It is therefore likely that there will be many migration projects in the future to convert AI-generated codebases back into clean structures. For this reason, Vibe Coding is particularly suitable for creating prototypes to test concepts.
There are now also complaints in open source projects that every now and then there are contributions that convert almost half of the code base and add faulty functions. Of course, common sense and the many standards established in software development help here. It’s not like we haven’t had experience with bad code commits in open source before. This gave rise to the dictatorship workflow for tools like Git, which was renamed Pull Request by the code hosting platform GitHub.
So how can you quickly identify bad code? My current prescription is to check test coverage for added code. No testing, no code merge. Of course, test cases can also be Vibe Coded or lack necessary assertions, which can now also be easily recognized automatically. In my many years in software development projects, I’ve experienced enough that no Vibe Coder can even come close to bringing beads of sweat to my forehead.
My conclusion on the subject of Vibe Coding is: In the future, there will be a shortage of capable programmers who will be able to fix tons of bad production code. So it’s not a dying profession in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, a few clever people will definitely script together a few powerful isolated solutions for their own business with simple IT knowledge that will lead to competitive advantages. As we experience this transformation, the Internet will continue to become cluttered and the gems Weizenbaum once spoke of will become harder to find.
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