What is "Vibe Coding" and when should I use it?

Q: What is "Vibe Coding" and when should I use it?

Vibe coding is an AI-driven development practice where the primary concern is achieving the desired outcome rather than the quality, elegance, or maintainability of the underlying code. It's an approach where you accept messy, verbose, or even poorly structured code — as long as it works and produces the intended result.

When Vibe Coding Makes Sense

Vibe coding can be a useful tool in specific, low-stakes contexts:

1. Cosmetic and presentation tasks — When you need to make a simple HTML page look good, and the AI generates 2,000 lines of CSS that works, that might be perfectly acceptable. The visual outcome matters more than elegant stylesheets.

2. Rapid prototyping and wireframing — Use AI to quickly generate a feature implementation, study the approach, take notes on what works, then delete the code and rewrite it properly. This treats AI-generated code as a learning tool rather than production code.

3. Brainstorming technical approaches — Let the AI explore different implementation strategies while you focus on understanding the problem space and potential solutions.

Critical Limitations and Ethical Boundaries

The acceptability of vibe coding depends entirely on context. There's a stark ethical line:

• Never use vibe coding for critical systems — It would be "criminally unethical" to apply this approach to medical software, financial systems, safety-critical applications, or any domain where code quality directly impacts human welfare.

• Avoid it for long-term maintenance — Code that "just works" today becomes technical debt tomorrow. If others will maintain the code, or if it will evolve over time, vibe coding creates problems.

• Consider the debugging cost — When 2,000 lines of AI-generated CSS breaks, debugging becomes a nightmare. The time saved initially may be lost many times over in maintenance.

Best Practices

If you choose to use vibe coding:

• Document the decision — Make it clear that code was generated with outcome-first priorities

• Isolate vibe-coded components — Keep them separate from core business logic

• Set clear boundaries — Define explicitly which parts of your project can tolerate this approach

• Plan for replacement — Treat vibe code as temporary scaffolding that will eventually need proper implementation

Vibe coding is essentially about choosing the right tool for the right job. For a one-off marketing page that needs to look good tomorrow, it might be perfect. For anything that matters — anything that affects users, handles data, or requires reliability — write real code.