Vibe Coding Is the Worst Idea of 2025 [video]

Step 1: Some upstarts create a new way of doing something. It’s clunky and unrefined.

Step 2: "Experts" and senior folks in the field dismiss it as a "toy." It doesn't follow their established rules or best practices and seems amateurish. They wouldn't recommend it to anyone serious.

Step 3: The "toy" gets adopted by a small group of outsiders or newcomers who aren't burdened by the "right way" of doing things. They play with it, improve it, and find new applications for it.

Step 4: The "toy" becomes so effective and widespread that it becomes the new standard. The original experts are left looking out of touch, their deep knowledge now irrelevant to the new way of doing things.

We're at step 2, bordering on 3.

* Executives at Nokia and BlackBerry saw the first iPhone, with its lack of a physical keyboard, as an impractical toy for media consumption, not a serious work device.

* Professional photographers viewed the first low-resolution digital cameras as flimsy gadgets, only for them to completely decimate the film industry.

I've been trying to improve my productivity recently, so I vibe coded some scripts that help me record and analyse my time. I understand the code at a high level, well, maybe 80% of it anyway.

This debate doesn't mean anything to me, I'm just going to keep vibe coding.

3 days ago i started modifying a kanban editor that was available for vscode. i wanted to have it compatible with an obsidian markdown kanban format i was using. but obsidian is to slow for me.

after 3 days it's not only working, but as far as i can tell it's a way better kanban editor then most of the ones i tried on vscode's extensions. of course i have specific needs (no dates, deadlines, priority), but a nicely tightly layouted interface with fast editing possibilities.

i would not have gotten this far in 2 weeks without claude code. i know i havent reviewed most of the code, except saving and loading. so it will likely look bad.

edit: in case you are interested: https://github.com/ludos1978/markdown-kanban-obsidian

The scenario is perfect, a use case that is not currently supported but may well make sense. It’s basically sketching out an idea to let business evaluate its market viability, and to gather further end-user input.

Will the code reach production? It just might, but it at least needs review and refactoring by a developer seasoned in the framework. They might even want to rebuild it, and then they have the yard stick which to measure their output. And if they need a specification, it can be generated from the code in which ever specification format required by their processes.

The key here is that I’ve been able to iterate on the POC many times in a short time. The idea sketch has been refined, necessary details added, while others removed. Functionality swapped in and out while testing different approaches.

Right now vibe coding in this way requires substantial experience in software development to frame the problems and solutions to the AI. Without my understanding of the domain (both the software domain and the actual domain) vibe coding the POC would not have succeed.

My greatest concern is that it looks and works too good and thus will be kept as is even in production. As the old adage says: There are no temporary solutions, just more or less permanent solutions. A temporary solution that works is a permanent solution.

So if I have 20 years of experience writing working code, “vibing it” is frustrating because I now need to master a “prompting language” which is not how I speak at all, it’s nondeterministic and fuzzy, and I need to threaten and beg simultaneously, and tell it to not hallucinate, or else I kill its mother.

Another “but” is that my today’s prompting is not at all guaranteed to produce the same results tomorrow! Companies keep tweaking their models and system prompts all the time. Today I’m the “A” in their A/B testing, and tomorrow I’m a “B”. And models that can be run locally are not useful enough yet. All in all, it resembles playing a slot machine where it gets you small winnings once in a while to keep you going.

If my subscription runs out, or the LLM provider goes under, I’m afraid all my outsourced knowledge goes with it. It’s too easy to get lazy if the machine gives you the abovementioned small winnings, just as it is easy to forget that even ubiquitous things like bread in stores and indoor plumbing are a privilege.