Written on 2025 November 10
"Vibe coding." This term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, who wrote in a X post:
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.
That's interesting, isn't it? You just tell the AI what you want and boom -- The AI does the rest. No more debugging nightmares, no more time wasted on some weird, obscure programming language quirks, and no more time spent implementing complex stuff that takes weeks to complete. But the more I think about it, the more this “future” feels less like empowerment and more like dependency.
To be clear, I don’t hate vibe coding. It's pointless to hate a method just because it works differently. In fact, I'm one of the first users to try it out. My GitHub Student Developer Pack offers free access to Copilot Pro, and I’ve vibe coded quite a few projects myself, too. It’s fun, it’s fast, and honestly, it feels like magic when it works.
But that's exactly what worries me, there's already countless posts about people can't code anymore without AI. Those aren't just isolated edge cases, either. Developers, especially newer ones, are starting to lose the ability to think through their problems and come up with solutions on their own. Instead of learning programming concepts, they just prompt their way to the solution. Is that really a good thing?
I say this as a high school student who is still learning to code. I've never worked in a professional environment, but I can already see the shift happening. My teachers, some online communities, and even some of my peers are starting to assume that using AI is part of the normal workflow, and coding without it is just old-fashioned or inefficient. The default expectation now seems to be that you're using AI to help you code, and if you're not, you're at a disadvantage.
Worse, we're now seeing "AI educators" selling lessons and courses on "how to code with AI", even though they themselves don't have experience in coding without AI. Some can't build anything without asking ChatGPT to do it for them, but they're selling expert guidance to others. It's the blind leading the blind, but with better marketing. Unfortunately, people buy it. Here's an example
Even though I'm too young to be cynical, it's not hard to see that the industry is shifting its expectations. AI-assisted coding will soon be an expected skill for developers, probably around the time it's my turn to enter the workforce. Knowing how to effectively use AI tools to speed up development will be a must-have skill, and those who can't keep up will be left behind. This will change what it means to be a developer. If all you do is use AI to write code for you, you're not coding. You're just managing an AI that codes for you.
Also, since these tools are owned by a few massive companies, your ability to create software might be depending on their APIs, subscriptions, and permissions. Want to build something? Better keep paying. Better follow their ToS. Better hope the model won't be offline for maintenance when you need it the most. It's a shift from being a creator to being a consumer of AI services. You're no longer independently creating software. You will be Coding As A Service, a service you rent access to.
To me, that doesn't feel like an improvement or progress. That's just dependency. Coding used to be about understanding, problem-solving, and creativity. Now, AI coding risks flattening all that into homogenous, generic, AI-generated code that looks the same because it's all generated by the same underlying models. The unique styles and approaches that individual developers bring to their work are being lost in favor of AI-generated uniformity.
I believe vibe coding is the future, it boosts productivity like nothing else. But if it is, we should at least stop pretending that it's the modern way to code. From where I'm standing, it looks less like liberation and more like outsourcing our creativity and skills to a handful of tech giants, one monthly subscription at a time.