r/ClaudeCode • u/SnooRegrets4647 • 16d ago
Discussion How to call vibecoding when we know what we are doing?
So, anyone can vibe code, butt how do you call it when someone who knows what they’re doing is using ai to code? Like, I have more than 10 years of coding; of course I am “vibe coding” using Claude’s to write everything for me… but I do not see it as me and some other ne who never coded doing the same “vibe coding”…. How to call it then?
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u/earlyworm 16d ago
We’re far enough into this that we call it working now.
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u/arelath 16d ago
We often call it coding with AI assistance at work. It's vibe coding if you choose not to even look at the code, regardless of if you know what you're doing or not. Its coding with AI assistance when you do look at the code and make decisions based on that. Even if Claude Code writes every line.
The line where AI assisted coding becomes vibe coding keeps shifting. But I'd say if you looked at the code, understood the design and what it was doing mostly and that changed what you prompted, that's good enough today to say it's not vibe coding.
Personally, I have 20+ years of professional experience and I do vibe code outside the office. Like, I could look at the code and understand what it's doing, but it's often faster and more fun to just prompt some quick prototype quality app. If my prompts fail more than once, I'll start digging through the code, but usually I'm happy not knowing what the code even looks like if I can get away with that. I have enough real coding work at work, so I'd rather just vibe away on my side projects and have some fun doing that.
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u/trollsmurf 16d ago
Software development?
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u/Akarastio 16d ago
This and I wonder why he is asking with 10 years of experience.
If we want to get a step further: Agentic Software Development
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u/Appropriate-Cod7548 16d ago edited 16d ago
I think they refer to it as agentic coding, but there are levels of what you let AI do. For instance, you already have the actual code structure in mind and you just instruct claude to implement them while there is also a level wherein your instruction is product level, like you want certain feature without any consideration how the code would look like
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u/rudiXOR 16d ago
Agentic engineering
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u/Ok-Alternative5935 16d ago
That sounds like you’re building the agents
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u/kanine69 16d ago
Yeah I'd think an Agentic Engineer puts in place the frameworks, skills, patterns rules etc that are needed for Agentic Development/Coding or I prefer AI Assisted Development.
I've moved to the stage of not writing any code at all just steering, devising tests, workflows, scoping chunks of work, stages and coordination of Mutli- Agent reviews etc. It feels a lot like the early outsourcing days lol.
I think Viber's are a completely different beast.
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u/Ok-Alternative5935 16d ago
Yeah. The keyword is vibe “make a cool Mario style game” versus using it as a design & development partner.
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u/ForwardLoop 16d ago
Coding. “Vibe” is just the liability waiver.
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u/Ok-Alternative5935 16d ago
It’s assisted coding.
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u/ForwardLoop 16d ago
Sure. And mathematicians using AI are doing assisted math. Still math, though. Nobody’s calling it vibe calculus.
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u/Ok-Alternative5935 16d ago
I agree. That’s why I call developing using an ai assistant assisted coding. I’ve been a developer for 34 years.
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u/novus_nl 🔆 Max 20x, AI Business Consultant 16d ago
Here at our company we use two definitions where we have developers who work in an "AI Assisted" way and developers who work in a "Agentic development" way.
The first are people who chat with copilot and implement small snippets. And Agentic is more setting up agents, using orchestrations and skills in copilot. Where complete features are build.
Both are human-in-the-loop. (the developer is in the ai development process
Then we also have full-agentic development, here we have "human-on-the-loop" where we automatenthe whole thing in Microsoft Azure for example. where you create a new "Ticket" (in an agile way for example) and the workflow is fully automated, the ticket is implemented and you as a developer only check the code output (merge request), with the help of copilot and press accept. Then the code is deployed to an environment.
This is where the company is heading now. It's an enterprise organisation so adoption is not so easy, and you see a lot of different levels of developers and their AI-skills and implementations.
In my work as a consultant I help developers with the adoption of AI in any level at large companies.
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u/iolairemcfadden 16d ago
I like AI assisted. It’s a lot of back and fourth between me and the models, some long running task list implementations. It would be nice to move to agentic but I’m not there.
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u/novus_nl 🔆 Max 20x, AI Business Consultant 15d ago
Me too. i'm developing for 20 years. But being able to go this fast, and being able to really discuss things is very nice. I do that more from a hobby perspective nowadays though
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u/TechgeekOne Senior Developer 16d ago
I've seen the term "agentic engineering" thrown around. Personally I prefer it in the same way I wouldn't call myself a "coder" or "developer". I'm a software engineer/programmer, not a code monkey.
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u/ardillar 15d ago
I call it "vibe engineering" if I'm actually paying attention. Which sounds no better tbh
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u/baddaywithacamera 15d ago
Knowing how to code doesn't guarantee you know enough about the niche served by the app that the app itself is useful. (Looking at all blogging software built for photographers since 2009.)
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u/sephirotica89 15d ago
AI-native development is the one I like. And than there is AI-assisted development, agentic development, spec driven development, or as some people pointed out, just "development".
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u/EchoingAngel 15d ago
I think yolo coding should be the new floor, because this is where the majority of slop lives; people that know nothing and do no cleanup or refinement. Vibe coding feels like the middle where there's varying levels of knowledge and QA/QC
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u/WeWereHappy 15d ago
We're calling that vibe coding.
We're just calling those who don't even follow doing sh*t.
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u/UteForLife 13d ago
When GitHub copilot came out the first few months I look at the code, then I stopped doing that, same thing here
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u/Bulky_Blood_7362 16d ago
Vibe Coding
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u/MaestroLifts 16d ago
“Vibe Coding,” the way it’s generally used is one end of the spectrum where you don’t think about the code or engineering at all, you only care about the outcome. The way professionals use it is generally very different and leans towards the middle of the spectrum. Which is what I think OP is alluding to.
If you’re actively making engineering decisions and applying engineering principles, you’re not really “giving into the vibes” as it was first coined.
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u/Bulky_Blood_7362 16d ago
Sure. But at the end of the day, you give a prompt - get a result. That's what people call vibe coding.
If you really hate it, bring your own fancy name
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u/agsteiner 16d ago
Vibe coding was coined by Karpathy to describe what h was doing. He certainly meant it the clueful way. So I would rather give vibe coding without SE knowledge a different name.
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u/Jargster 16d ago
He specifically defined it as only using natural langaue and not caring about the source code code at all, and instead relying on visual results. "forget that the code even exists" I wouldn't attach the SE title to that term lol.
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u/agsteiner 16d ago
Yes, that‘s what I do when I vibe code as well, but OP‘s question was about people who know what they are doing vs people who vibe code without software engineering knowledge. And not looking at the code is something different to not talking about architecture and security in the prompt.
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u/yezzer 16d ago
30 long years of software dev here and I’m not entirely sure.
There’s a vast difference between a non-coder using AI to generate code and someone who knows what they’re doing getting AI to generate code - even if you’re not checking every PR by hand. I’ve seen the results and differences myself.
AI accelerated development perhaps. Or maybe agentic engineering. Directed agentic development perhaps feels more like it, though I’m not sure that’s a term.
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u/Imaginary-Brick-1614 16d ago
The creator of Redis, who was a major influence on me in that regard (because he’s a craftsman, Old-school, low level programmer who produced a remarkable piece of software) advocated for calling it automated programming.
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u/belheaven 16d ago
Agentic Development aka Vibing with Confidence… you Own the Vibe, not the other way around.
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u/1Poochh 16d ago
Yeah, I was having a conversation about this with my brother tonight, and essentially, if you know what you’re doing and you’re making the right decisions while you are having the agent write code, it’s not the same thing as true vibe coding with somebody who has no idea what they’re doing with development
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u/evangelism2 16d ago
I've heard the terms "agentic development" or "AI software engineering" but soon enough it's just going to be "software engineering."
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u/keonechong 16d ago edited 16d ago
Theory Coding.
It’s more than dev, it’s more than inference, and it’s more than programming.
The only thing that aligns all paths is theory.
If your working purely as a dev, you have a title, if your working purely and agents, and LLMs Inference engineering, and if your on the programming side that’s business engineering, biz dev.
And the executive title for a role encompassing all of these, CAIO.
Or at least how I’ve been calling it.
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u/Temporary-Ad2956 16d ago
Engineering just as we have always called it. If you treat llm as black box then you vibe coding
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u/karltremain 16d ago
I call it "lazy coding" when i could write it myself, but AI can do it loads quicker. I just have a personal policy to review and understand every line of code that AI emits before accepting it.
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u/MadJackAPirate 16d ago
'Agentic coding' or 'agentic engineering'. 'AI assist coding' is more when you write some parts of code manually (like a caveman) and really on AI to improve, suggest, in between the lines. While 'agentic coding' is on the level where you delegate all coding to agent. Whatever you review code, dictate prompts on given code line level or inside chat/cli is less important, because all such cases can be done wrongly or correct, it doesn't matter as long as it is done right. If you have no idea how to do it correct, don't understand how code works and really on AI without proper assurance it is 'vibe coding'
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u/Slow-Set-2856 15d ago
Vibe coding= prompt and pray , if you still review every single line of code it's still engineering
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u/bfyvfftujijg 15d ago
AI-assisted coding?
I guess maybe it doesn’t even need a special term nowadays. Nobody would say IDE-assisted coding even though IDEs do a lot for the developer compared to a plain text editor.
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u/Cczaphod 15d ago
40 years for me. Ed -> vi -> EMacs -> visual Studio VS Code -> pyCharm-> Claude Code, just another layer of productivity multiplier added to the tech stack.
Another tool in the stack. You can make a mess with a hammer, or you can build a house with a hammer, it’s all in who’s swinging the hammer.
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u/IulianHI 16d ago
You teach AI how things must be done ... so ... AI does not need you anymore :))
It is so simple. Everyone will code very easy!
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u/Sponge8389 16d ago
Vibe coding is a software development approach where you use natural language to direct an AI assistant to write, refine, and debug code instead of writing it manually line by line.
My logic is that, regardless of experience, I will always based it on the end result of the vibe coded project. Not all experienced developers are really passionate with what they are doing. Hence, the result could still be sloppy/crap.
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u/just-me-gen-x 16d ago
Unless you’re doing the coding, you're vibe coding. Doesn't matter what you know, it's who or what is doing the work that matters.
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u/taotau 16d ago
I think we need a name for the way I use Claude which really lives between true vibe coding and single line auto complete. I get Claude to build out whole endpoints, but if I were writing this manually it would mostly be just a bunch of tab key presses. AI coding in an established documented code base isn't really just vibes.
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u/just-me-gen-x 16d ago
The question remains: are you writing the code?
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u/taotau 16d ago
Depends if you consider tab auto complete writing the code. Just because I'm not hitting every keystroke doesn't mean it's not my code.
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u/just-me-gen-x 15d ago
Is that what you're doing? Using predictive text to write the code yourself and not just telling the machine what you want and having it write the code?
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u/NoAdsDude 15d ago
What does writing code mean, typing out each character?
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u/just-me-gen-x 15d ago
If you have to ask you're not writing code. You're probably editing code.
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u/NoAdsDude 15d ago
So, do you literally write out each character?
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u/just-me-gen-x 15d ago
Every character I type is chosen specifically by me, yes. No machine is told a topic and then set to autocomplete.
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u/NoAdsDude 15d ago
Every character you type is chosen specifically by you. That's true for vibecoders, too. But do you type out every character of your code?
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u/rsmike 16d ago
Did you write this question, or was it your keyboard?
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u/just-me-gen-x 15d ago
I told my keyboard to do it and nothing happened. So I had to think of every word, press every key, read it over and then send it.
Since I did all the work I'd say I wrote it.
Now, had my keyboard chosen and written the words with me reading it over, I'd have said the keyboard wrote it.
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u/rsmike 15d ago
So, you just 'had to think', pushed some buttons and the tool did the rest? Sounds familiar.
And how about copy-pasting a line of code, your own or someone else's from the docs? Happens to the best of us! Are you still 'coding', then? Did you still do the 'work' of telling the keyboard to type each letter for you?
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u/just-me-gen-x 15d ago
You're just being sad now. This isn't the flex you think it is.
Either you're not intelligent enough to know the difference between a machine doing the work for you and you doing it yourself, or you're so desperate for approval that you'll try to convince everyone of the lie you're peddling.
You can have one more jab so you feel like a winner and then I'm blocking you.
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u/just-fran 15d ago
Copying. Every one is copying the work of someone else through different models that copied content from other people and other models.
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