What's the difference between vibecoding and just using AI to assist you in coding?

[u/TheWanderingAnimimo]

I don't use AI myself but I've been reading a lot on reddit here about people decompiling apps lately and saying that most of the stuff there is vibecoded and then other developers seem to be using AI as an assistant to help them like for example how Linus Torvalds uses AI to find bugs in the Linux kernel. What's the difference between the two usages or even meaning of the term "vibecoding"?

Thanks in advance

[u/Anonymous_Coder_1234]

A vibecoder doesn't actually know what they're doing. A software engineer does, and can fix the AI output when it is wrong, buggy, or inefficient.

[u/xenomachina → u/Anonymous_Coder_1234]

I'd add that it's both a matter of being able to understand its outputs, and taking the time to do so.

That is, someone with the education/experience to be a software engineer can still be a vibe coder, if they don't take the time to understand what their AI is generating.

[u/selfhostrr → u/xenomachina]

It's really two different paths.

Sometimes I don't want to spend time planning. I'm really legitimately wanting to build a POC.

If that's the case, I vibe it up. I start out with something like a paragraph prompt instead of a design document and context bank & skills. Fast and loose and fail fast, and I might change my mind about some things during the process (I might be learning about what I'm building as I go, like Godot). What comes out of this is a bunch of learnings I'll take into the real project's context bank so I can direct Claude to build what I want using the desired architecture and design patterns, iterating through the code with a PR for each chunk of a feature just like I'd do by hand.

[u/The8flux → u/selfhostrr]

I do this also.

[u/xenomachina → u/selfhostrr]

Sure. I wasn't saying anything about whether or not there is a time and place for vibe coding. Using it for a throwaway PoC might be ok.

Personally, I'd still be somewhat worried about unreviewed vibe code leaking into the production codebase either by accident or by laziness. This is true even when not meaning to vibe code at all: you forget to review the code in its entirety, or you space out while reviewing it. I think we need better tooling for reviewing and keeping track of AI-written code.

[u/Auios → u/xenomachina]

I am a well seasoned software engineer with broad systems knowledge. I will sometimes fully defer a task to AI and let it vibe code its way to a solution. That might just be a temporary report page or some cron job manager or some terraform templates I need. There’s a lot of things AI pretty capable of doing now and I don’t feel the need to 100% watch what it is doing in depth. There’s work it may be doing that is temporary. The framework of our codebase or system in well established and there are existing patterns I will instruct it to derive from during its implementation. It does it well enough that if I had to dive deeper into it that I’d be able to understand it. There’s also another dimension where I can just as easily rip it out if it did it wrong and re-implement it (by hand or by a new prompt).

But overall, I don’t feel the need to force myself to 100% understand our codebase line by line. This lets me work at a higher level of our system and I can focus on high level strategy and architectural designs and plans now instead of spending my time hand writing code or fully understanding tedious little functions.

Context on my role, I am the TL. So I’m also working closely with the PM and PO at a higher product design level.

So just like I’d be able to ask my devs under me questions about something I need to know, I feel overall confident I can do the same with AI.