Vibe Coding's Death Greatly Exaggerated

Everyone's dunking on vibe coding right now. The serious engineers are back: "this was always a fad, real work requires planning, the adults are in the room again." And look, they're not entirely wrong. If vibe coding means "prompt an agent and ship whatever comes back" -- yeah, that's garbage. It was always garbage. Bury it.

But that's not what I do. And I don't think it's what the best people are doing either.

What I do is sit in a terminal and talk. I look at the thing I'm building, I react to it, I say what's wrong, the AI fixes it, and I look again. Over and over. Fifteen rounds on how a lightbox should close. Thirty rounds on a layout that's almost right but not quite. I click through my own app so many times that the problems become physical -- I can feel when something's off before I can explain why.

That's not vibe coding. That's just design. That's what designers have always done. The only difference is the tool changed.

The flex right now is the autonomous mega-PR. "Sixteen Claude agents built a C compiler in two weeks for twenty grand." I get it. It's impressive. But it's a parlor trick. And now you hear about a Cloudflare engineer rebuilding Next.js in a week for eleven hundred bucks. It's a parlor trick, and I'm a little concerned where it's leading us, to be frank.

Because the framing is exactly backwards. "Look what AI can do." Okay, cool. But who's clicking through that output? Who's living in it? Who's doing the two hundredth pass where you finally notice the thing that's been bugging you since the third pass? Nobody. That's not the point of the demo. The point is scale. And scale without taste is just more stuff. It should be "what can I do with AI?" Don't get me wrong, I'm not a skeptic, and I'm actually not surprised that humans aren't reviewing code anymore. It's probably a good thing. What worries me is that humans aren't even reviewing the apps they're creating.

It's not that an agent team can run for a day on my behalf that excites me. It's that it makes starting over cheap. I still obsess. I still spend way more time than I should on a component. But it's just less precious now. And if I was wrong, well, I can just trash it.

When this whole vibe coding thing first showed up on my radar, I was in total agreement with the critics. I thought it was crap. It felt like it was intruding on my territory. I'd spent years learning to code -- specifically out of frustration with engineers who said "no, it can't be done." I was the guy on the back of the comic book throwing chairs and tables around, and I finally figured it out, and I could code myself. Here come the vibe coders.

It wasn't long before I started talking with the agents. I was skeptical at first because they just couldn't do anything. But when I really started -- and I hate saying this -- talking to AI like another human, everything changed. A back and forth. What do you think? I don't know. This seems weird. Kind of like that. And it got it.

Then I discovered vibes. It's all about vibes. It's literally how I got into design. It's why I'm a good designer. I just know it when I see it, and I know trash when I see trash, and I just keep vibing until I can see that it works.

I barely open VS Code anymore. I have a screenshot watcher that captures my screen every few seconds so the AI can see what I see. When I say "that spacing feels heavy," we're looking at the same thing. That sounds like a gimmick. It's the tightest feedback loop I've ever had with any tool in twenty years of making things.

And that's what worries me about the current discourse. The loudest voices are optimizing for throughput. How many files. How many PRs. How fast. But throughput was never the bottleneck. Taste was the bottleneck. Judgment was the bottleneck. Knowing when something isn't right and caring enough to fix it -- that was always the hard part, and it's still the hard part. AI didn't change that. AI made everything around it cheaper, which actually makes taste more valuable, not less.

Anyone can build anything now. That's the reality. Any app, any feature, any interface. Agents can execute. The scary-boring truth is that execution capacity stopped being scarce. So what's left? The eye. The instinct. The willingness to look at something that technically works and say "no, start over." That's not vibes. That's the whole game.

So yeah, vibe coding is dead. The lazy version, the "ship it without looking at it" version. Good riddance. But obsessing over the details, getting it right, caring about the product? That just takes time. And it takes vibes. Vibing's not dead, and it's not going to die. You still have to care.