When the Vibes End, the Thinking Begins
The Seduction
There are words that reveal more than their users intend. “Vibe Coding” is one of them. The very sound has something frivolous about it: a bit of feeling, a bit of improvisation, a bit of digital séance. You tell the machine roughly what you want, and it responds with code. The process seems effortless, almost elegant. Above all, it flatters an era that likes to tell itself that complexity can be replaced by intuition.
The seduction is obvious. At last, software development appears demystified. At last, we no longer have to watch those enigmatic specialists who, between tickets, builds and error messages, have made a profession of translating uncertainty into syntax. Now, apparently, language suffices. A wish, a prompt, a result. The machine produces, the human curates, and everyone suddenly feels a little like a creator.
Only that is precisely the error.
Producing Is Not Understanding
Vibe Coding may be many things: fast, playful, intoxicating, sometimes even productive. What it is not: engineering. It is the confusion of producing with understanding. Of expression with structure. Of function with responsibility.
A prototype can be generated in hours today, sometimes in minutes. That is remarkable. But a system is not born the moment something runs on screen. A system begins where requirements are not merely asserted but clarified. Where interfaces are not merely connected but mastered. Where dependencies, load cases, failure modes, security assumptions and maintainability appear not as tedious afterthoughts but as the actual substance of the work.
What Is Truly Valuable
This is precisely why the current debate is so unsatisfying. It acts as though writing code were the substance of software development. Yet it has always been merely its most visible part, not its most valuable. What is valuable is not that someone types. What is valuable is that someone judges. That someone penetrates the problem deeply enough for diffuse wishes to become defensible decisions.
AI therefore does not primarily threaten the engineer. It primarily threatens the illusion that execution is already understanding. What comes under pressure is the role that confines itself to local implementation, to working through a sub-problem without claiming system responsibility. This is not a cultural drama but an economic shift. Commoditised execution is getting cheaper. That is all. Only the consequences are far-reaching.
The Real Distinction
The real distinction therefore does not run between human and machine. It runs between the one who generates code and the one who takes responsibility for systems. Between the one who produces building blocks and the one who knows why they belong together in precisely this form. Between tinkering and judgement.
That is why the future does not belong to whoever prompts most fluently. It belongs to whoever forces the machine into a process. Whoever specifies requirements, designs architecture, cuts modules, defines tests, reviews results and has the courage to distrust a plausible output. It is not the vibes that will win. What will win is the willingness to distrust ease.
In my own practice, this is exactly what I experience. Since I began integrating AI consistently into my work — not as an oracle but as a tool under direction — I have something I did not have since a while: a highly specialised team. One agent researches dependencies, another generates test cases, a third writes documentation. I orchestrate, review, decide. The roles are clearly defined: the machine produces under guidance. Responsibility stays with me. This is not vibe coding. This is engineering with new means.
When the Demo Becomes Operations
For the moment a demo becomes operations, an idea becomes a contract, an application becomes a liability, the romance ends. Then what begins again is what never ceased to be the core of good development: thinking, deciding, taking responsibility.
Everything else is just improvisation with remarkably good autocomplete.