Is vibe coding really as easy as they say? Consider the butler, the meat-space equivalent of an AI. There are schools that specialize in teaching new butlers skills like how to serve breakfast or make a perfect martini. But did you know these same schools have a parallel track teaching rich people how to get along with their butler? That’s right, rich people learn how to hold the teacup correctly, so the butler can gracefully fill it with tea. They even learn what kinds of requests are appropriate and which are not. It’s the sort of thing that can’t be taught in a two-minute TikTok video.
Being waited on hand and foot isn’t easy. There’s a right way to hold the teacup, and it’s important to know the difference between appropriate requests and ones that are doomed to fail.
The same goes for vibe coding. Oh, sure, it’s amazing what artificial intelligence and generative AI can do. A good AI coding assistant can piece together working code that does much of what a developer wants, often based on just a few sketchy sentences and some random hand-waving (aka prompt engineering). Some days, you can type a few lines, and the AI will do in minutes what would otherwise take hours, or days. But those are the good days. The limitations of AI-generated code can be subtle, but they’re always present. And to make matters worse, we’re not exactly sure what they might be. We’re all just learning—humans and machines alike.