I am starting to realize that I’m not super young anymore when I only find out about trends mid way through them and only resonate with about half of them.

One trend I heard about recently that definitely doesn’t resonate with me is vibe coding, i.e., getting AI to do all the work for you.

I am not opposed to using AI to aid with development. It’s great for helping with ideas, catching things you’ve missed and when a problem has really got you stumped it can help you or point you in the right direction.

Why I think it’s dumb

So given how helpful AI is in coding, why do I think vibe coding is dumb?

Firstly, let’s imagine that everything goes perfectly for you and your new startup based on an app written entirely by AI, with no input other than some prompts from you. Ignoring minor problems like clients asking you to explain details about your app that you can’t answer.

What will happen when you’ve made it big and become the leader in your industry, and novel problems start plaguing your app and you have bugs that are uncommon and specific to your runtime environment? Without training data, the AI can’t help you. If it’s something so unique to your application and never seen before, it will be a struggle for chat-based AI to fix. And if you have no idea how your app runs under the hood, good luck explaining it to a real engineer to fix.

Can vibe coding be dangerous

Yes, yes it can. There is a ton YouTube videos out there exploring this. But obviously if you don’t understand what your code is doing. The AI could have written anything in there. If you’re using AI from a less than trustworthy source then they could have even put malware or back doors in your application.

What can I do then?

Apologies if I sound like every school in the 2010s, but seriously, learn to code. It’s not only incredibly fun but also a fantastic way to enhance your creativity and problem-solving skills. Embrace the opportunity to develop this valuable skill. Don’t shy away from using AI. keep using it, but learn to collaborate with it thoughtfully instead of relying on it to generate low-quality or careless work.