Vibe Coding Is Not a Bug — It's the Whole Point

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" and the internet had a minor meltdown. Developers were celebrating. Researchers were panicking. Tech Twitter did what Tech Twitter does best: turned a two-word phrase into a three-week culture war.

Here's the vibe-coded definition, since we're being precise: vibe coding is writing software by telling an AI what you want, then mostly just saying "yeah that's right" or "no, different" until something works.

No PR reviews. No architecture diagrams. No pair programming. Just you, a prompt, and a lot of tab-completion faith.

The critique army mobilized immediately. "This isn't real engineering." "The code will be unmaintainable garbage." "You're just rubber-stamping AI slop." And look — they're not entirely wrong. The code that comes out of vibe coding sessions is often chaotic. Variable names might be weird. The architecture might be "what happens when you let a talented but slightly manic architect loose for 20 minutes." There might be entire files that serve no documented purpose.

But here's what the critics are missing: that chaos is not a side effect. It's the product.

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The Job Title Changed. Nobody Told the Job Description.

We keep pretending that "software engineer" means what it meant in 2010. Write code. Review code. Merge code. Push to prod on Friday at 4:55 PM and hope nothing breaks over the weekend.

That job still exists. But it's not the job that's winning anymore.

The job that's winning looks like this: understand a domain, define what good looks like, write just enough prompt to get an AI to build toward that definition, evaluate the output, give feedback, iterate. Repeat until the thing does what it's supposed to do.

Notice what's missing from that list: actually typing the code.

The highest-leverage activity in software development is no longer writing code. It's defining the problem.

This is deeply uncomfortable for people who got into software engineering because they liked typing. Code was the craft. The act of typing — the feeling of the keyboard, the flow state of a refactor, the satisfaction of a clever algorithm — that was the thing. If you're vibe coding, you're not doing that part.

But let's be honest about who we're describing. Not every developer is a craftsman trapped in a code factory. Most developers are building internal tools, MVPs, automation scripts, prototypes, integrations. For them, the code was never the point. The code was the means to an end. And if AI can handle the means more efficiently, that's not a tragedy — that's progress.