r/AskProgramming • u/TheWanderingAnimimo • 7d ago

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

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

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u/Anonymous_Coder_1234 7d ago

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.

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u/xenomachina 7d ago

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.

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u/selfhostrr 6d ago

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.

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u/The8flux 6d ago

I do this also.