"Vibe coding" will not save your product (but it is not the enemy either)

Open any tech feed right now and you will see it: someone shipped a full app in a weekend by describing what they wanted to an AI tool and letting it write the code. The term for it is "vibe coding," and the excitement is real. I use these tools myself, daily. They are a genuine step change in how fast a working prototype can exist.

What gets left out of the highlight reel is what happens after the demo. I have been called in more than once to fix a product that got 80% of the way there through pure AI generation and then hit a wall the tool could not talk its way through.

What the tools are actually good at

AI coding assistants are extremely good at pattern completion: give them a clear, narrow instruction and they will produce reasonable code fast. Boilerplate, CRUD screens, a first pass at a component, glue code between two APIs. That used to eat hours of a developer's week. Now it eats minutes. That is a real, permanent shift, and pretending otherwise is just nostalgia for typing more.

What they are not good at

They do not know your business. They do not know that the "simple" feature you just described will quietly break your billing logic, or that the database schema they generated will not survive your actual traffic pattern, or that the auth flow they wrote has a hole in it that will not show up until someone tries to exploit it. They optimize for code that looks plausible and runs. Plausible and correct are not the same thing, and the distance between them is exactly where technical debt is born.

The founders who get burned are usually the ones who treat the tool as a replacement for engineering judgment instead of an accelerant for it. The ones who do well treat it the other way around: they still make the calls on architecture, data, and what actually matters for the business, and let the AI handle the typing.

Where that leaves things

I do not think "vibe coding" is a fad and I do not think it is a replacement for building things properly. It is a faster keyboard. Someone still has to know what to type, why, and what happens six months later when the product has real users and real money moving through it. That is the part I actually get hired for.