Vibe coding and why it's not your way to wealth

I need a website. Can you create one? Nope.

I need a mobile application. Do you know how to build it? Nope.

Vibe coding should be the solution to the above, right?

Nope.

Even though vibe coding is the thing right now and there are zillions of courses that you can pay for and start your own business in a matter of hours… that will not serve you. I am sorry for the bad news!

Some time ago, I participated in a workshop that introduced vibe coding as another way to speed up your daily tasks. I did vibe coding for some time without calling it so. The essence of vibe coding is to use any GenAI to do the coding stuff for you. Just an example: you can screenshot a website and ask the GenAI to create a page that looks like the one you passed to it. And it works like a charm — most of the time. And this is where the good news is over.

I am still not a Python developer, but I write consistent Python code. Is that possible at all? Yes, it is. Writing code is way more complicated than just writing printf(). Software tends to get complicated, and it takes time to grasp the whole product. If AI is capable of helping, it’s exactly with that. It performs brilliantly when you need to track dependencies, imports, methods, inheritance, and more. There is tremendous improvement in the area where it takes time for a human being to track down methods with slight changes in their name or parameters. Yes, I know it is not a good practice to have methods with only plural as the difference, but in reality, this happens more often than you can imagine.

If we go back to my statement “I am not a Python developer,” we can explore a different point of view. So I am not a Python developer, and sometimes GenAI is looping through possible solutions to a bug, for example. It gives you one solution, which doesn’t work. Then it gives you a second idea, but it doesn’t work as well. What happens quite often is that it simply goes into an endless loop and can’t find a solution outside the ideas it already gave you. In such cases, you have two options:

• Use another agent/GenAI.
  
  

• Solve it yourself.
  
  

Sometimes, using another agent or GenAI gives you the solution you need. But sometimes, you need to put your brain to work, read the code, and solve it. And this is why I refuse to create a website or mobile application. I lack the knowledge of what is important and how to implement security, for example. Yes, I can learn it, but we can’t expect every developer to become any-platform developer. Believe it or not, that’s the reason why I believe a position called “vibe coder” shall never exist!

Recently, in a dev group on Facebook, a post was added stating: I am looking for a job as a vibe coder. Language is not important to me.

It was a joke post, but I asked myself: if one day we get to the level where we will hire vibe coders, what tech questions shall we ask them? You know the tech interview is there to evaluate (barely possible in 1 hour) if you possess the knowledge and the skills for the position.

Vibe coding is not the solution to your software development needs. It will take a lot of time until GenAI and agents overtake the job of a software developer. And just a reminder: the algorithms are really old, but they will not disappear soon. Keep learning. Keep coding.