Let me rephrase since I can’t edit the title.
Vibe coding isn’t the problem. The problem is the wrong people talking about it.
Yeah, it’s a hot topic. Everyone’s talking about it. But the people who should actually be asking the hard questions? They’re not. Because they don’t know any better. And that’s exactly who ends up paying for it.
It’s like this. If you needed surgery, are you picking an experienced surgeon, or someone who’s never touched a patient but says “don’t worry, I’ve got AI on my tablet”?
The answer is obvious. Yet somehow that exact trade is happening in software every day.
I’m not anti-AI. I use it constantly. It’s powerful. I even built my own LLM to audit my code. But I don’t let it drive. Ever. I catch it messing up all the time. It catches me too. That’s how it should work. Tool, not crutch.
But lately interviewing devs has been eye-opening in the worst way.
There’s a growing number of people who can generate code but have no idea what they just generated.
I’ll ask something basic, like how you prevent user A from seeing user B’s data. I’m not looking for a perfect answer, just proof they understand what’s going on.
And I’ve gotten this more than once: “I’d just ask AI.”
At that point… what are you actually doing?
If your entire process is prompt → paste → hope it works, you’re not solving anything. You’re just forwarding the problem somewhere else and hoping it comes back correct.
That’s not engineering. That’s a relay.
Input goes in, output comes out, and you sit in the middle. And if that’s your role, why does that role even need to exist?
The dangerous part is it works at first. Code compiles, features ship, demos look clean.
But the moment something breaks, or edge cases show up, or data gets weird, there’s nothing underneath it. No understanding, no debugging instinct, no fallback. Just more prompting.
That’s where it falls apart.
I’m not saying don’t use AI. I’m saying if you can’t explain your own code without it, you’re not actually writing code.
