“Vibe coding” is the era we’re in now – AI-assisted building, where half the job is telling the model what you want and the other half is praying it understood you. I’ve been using a mix of tools lately — ChatGPT, Claude, Google, and all of it inside Visual Studio Code, and honestly, it’s changed how I approach coding sessions. In a good way… mostly.
The upside is obvious:
You can get stuff done ridiculously fast! Need a quick subroutine? A function to tidy up something repetitive? Boilerplate for an API endpoint? You can spin it up in minutes. It’s great for momentum and great for skipping the boring bits.
But yeah… the cracks show too. The big one is context drift.
You hit a problem. You try to fix it. The AI thinks the problem is something else entirely. You both go in circles like you’re arguing with someone who swears they’re listening but clearly isn’t. Before long, you’re debugging the AI’s misunderstanding of the issue more than the actual code.
And the models aren’t infallible. I’ve had suggestions that looked great on the surface but made absolutely zero sense when you actually walk through the code. You end up fixing the thing manually anyway! All good if you’re someone who has experience, but what if you’re brand new to coding or have no real coding knowledge at all? When the AI fails, you’ve got nothing to fall back on. You’re stuck in an error loop with no idea which end is up.
Then there’s the tool-specific chaos:
- ChatGPT can forget the plot halfway through a job.
- Claude (especially Sonnet 4.5) is brilliant but eats credits like it’s bulking for competition. I’ve literally run a single command against an MCP server in n8n and blown the day’s quota. Madness.
And this is where the vibe coding conversation gets interesting, because despite all those flaws – you can already see how quickly it’s improving. Early ChatGPT vs what we have now isn’t even a fair fight. We’ve gone from toy to tool to “almost assistant” in what… two years? If that curve continues, we’re not far off the Star Trek “Computer…” era. Natural conversation. Perfect context. Zero tail-chasing.
But that future comes with a dilemma:
What happens when the skill is no longer writing code… but prompting?
You’ll have people building apps without ever touching a loop or a variable let alone knowing what one is. And honestly? It’s the same argument we’ve had in other worlds.
It’s the DJ with the sync button vs the DJ on vinyl.
One uses pure manual skill. The other uses tech to level the playing field.
And the only people who really care are the ones who had it harder, because at the end of the day, if the output is indistinguishable, does it matter how you made it?
My take?
Vibe coding is fine – powerful even – as long as you don’t outsource your entire brain. Understand what’s being created. Know enough to take the wheel. Use the tools, but don’t disappear into them.
The future’s coming fast.
Just be ready to keep up with it, not get dragged by it.
