If you're not vibe coding you're going to be left behind?

For the uninitiated, here's what vibe coding means (from Wikipedia):

Vibe coding is an AI-powered programming practice where a programmer describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a LLM tuned for coding, while ignoring the details of the generated code.

(So interesting how terms catch on...)

Vibe coding could make sense in a startup environment when a lot of what you build is throw-away prototypes anyway.

But in larger tech companies, you must know things work at a deep level. Your value lies in mastery of a specific domain or technology. This is especially true for a junior developer.

The difference is:

• In Big Tech, you are working on a team, and your ability to be the go-to person for something is incredibly valuable. You can't hand wave the internals of a component you're working on.
• Maintenance is paramount in Big Tech, since the code you write might live on for years and many people may extend or modify your code. Until we get to the point where AI tools are able to reason through this and make further modifications (i.e. we hand over the full reins to AI), we cannot afford to ignore the internals of AI code.

It's a made-up term, but I feel like people are equating "vibe coding" to "YOLO coding." My take is that the effectiveness of using AI assist is going to be wholly dependent on the developer, based on their familiarity and experience (their "vibes" on what they see the AI spits out) with whatever they're working on.

It's just sales and hype: a lot of it is just exaggreration to get people to use AI more so AI company evaluations and hype.

I tried using AI tools to write CrowdStrike QL and it was not super helpful. I don't know about vibe coding, but I spent the entire time complaining out loud how much it sucked.