Vibe Coding: Between the Hype and the Gatekeeping

The professional community has split into two camps.

The first group is vibe-coding everything in sight: from their own unique Snake game (like Nokia's, only better) to SaaS solutions destined to turn the world upside down — ideally not once, but five times. The second group — old-school, battle-hardened engineers — watches the new wave with quiet contempt, rubbing their keyboard-worn hands in anticipation. They're waiting for the whole movement to collapse under the weight of AI-generated bugs.

But the truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle. Both sides are wrong. What follows is purely my take.

As a kid I dreamed of becoming a programmer: I studied computers from textbooks, worked through logic puzzles, learned Pascal and C. Then life dropped me into law school. After a long road from lawyer to factory manager, I made several attempts to get back into tech — HTML, CSS, a bit of Python, SoloLearn on my phone. But it always fizzled out: work, then more work, sometimes two or three jobs at once. There was no time for the classic "pivot to tech," and no real readiness to step out of my zone of _dis_comfort.

Then came migration, a difficult adjustment period, and a return to office routine — but with free evenings for the first time in years. And I got hooked on neural networks. The further I moved from prompts like "generate me looking like a prince on a white horse" toward prompts like "take on role X, address problem Y, deliver result Z" — the wider the field of possibilities became.

My first attempt was a website without a CMS. The frontend looked great; under the hood, things were, to put it gently, al dente. Attempts two and three ended roughly the same way. I wanted to quit, but a brain starved of new knowledge pushed me to keep going. I broke the work into small iterations, dug into architecture, security, integrations, automation — went from setting up a local server to understanding the nuances of deployment. And then the first real result appeared.

But it's not as simple as it looks.

Without understanding architecture, vibe-coding produces beautiful facades held together by duct tape, WD-40, and wishful thinking. They'll hold until... well, there are a lot of possible "untils."

That said, AI isn't a waste of time. You can absolutely vibe-code a prototype, ask the neural network to generate technical documentation for what you built, and then take that foundation to a real engineer for a production-ready result.

And the old-school devotees of manual solutions and hours of painstaking work — they'd do well to at least glance in AI's direction. If nothing else, it's an excellent translator from developer-speak into plain human language.