Are you wanting to try vibe coding, but don’t know if it’s worth it? Vibe coding really is awesome, I absolutely love it. However, you really do still need to know how to code to use it so effectively.
AI is getting better at writing code
I’ve built entire websites and apps with AI
When I first tried out vibe coding a year or so ago, it wasn’t good or bad—it was mediocre. I found that I was having to write more code than it was, and the debugging was endless.
These days, AI can actually write pretty solid code . I’ve built an entire SaaS platform using AI, a weather app , and I’m working on several more projects with vibe coding. I’m really enjoying the process, and it’s gotten me back into development—which is something I’ve been trying to get back into for years.
It’s pretty crazy. I can tell AI what I want it to do , and a few minutes later, it’s ready. It’s often not a one-shot thing, and I have to keep re-prompting to refine the design or function of something. But, at the end of the day, AI is the one writing all of the code that goes into these programs, and I’m just reviewing it. That’s the key: reviewing it.
AI might write and check its code, but it’s not perfect
AI deleted an guy’s entire storage drive “by mistake”
AI internally checks its own code before saying it’s ready, but it misses more than it lands most of the time. It’s a known problem in the development world, and has even become a meme of sorts.
While you have companies like Spotify using AI to write all their code , it’s not always a plug-and-play thing. In the case of corporations using programs like Claude, the code that AI writes is submitted for human review, and only if it passes review, is it then merged into the main codebase.
Often, the code has to be shipped back to the AI with issues to fix before it can be merged. That’s how my own programming journey with AI is going. It writes code, I test or review it, I tell it what it got wrong, then it goes back to work fixing the issues that it created. Rinse and repeat.
I think of the guy who was using Google’s Antigravity IDE and letting it run without permission checks, and Antigravity deleted his entire D drive on his computer . The way it did it was irreversible, and the data was gone. Not even data recovery companies could recover it. If AI can make a simple mistake like that, what mistakes could it make in your code without you knowing?
Knowing what code the AI is writing (or why it’s doing something) is more than half the battle
Do you know what a SQL migration is?
The biggest problem with vibe coding is you actually need to know what code the AI is writing . While I can’t, myself, write typescript or SQL, I know the gist of what it’s doing. I’ve written code on and off for years, and can understand the core structure of what it’s writing.
When I see the code that AI has written, I know how to debug it, I can check to see what it’s doing, and I understand the terminology within it. If it asks to run an SQL migration, I can look and see if it’s dropping a table, adding a table, modifying something, or what it’s doing.
If you have no idea about code, then it’s impossible for you to check up on what the AI is writing. It could be coding a back door into your program and you’d have no idea. It could write a piece of code that destroys an entire database.
I was vibe coding one night—trusting the AI far too much—and then a few days later I went to check something on my website and realized the AI had completely destroyed one of my database tables, overwriting it for another table I had it impliment instead of creating a new one. I lost all the data in that table because I wasn’t watching what the AI was doing.
I know SQL. Not enough to write entire SQL migration files from scratch, but enough to know what it’s doing. Had I simply paid closer attention to what the AI was writing, I could have easily caught it and prevented the data loss. I learned from this mistake and keep a slightly closer eye on what AI does with code now. It might take a little longer, but it’s safer.
If you’re wanting to get started with vibe coding, I would say do it! However, you should at least have a working knowledge of the code you’re attempting to have AI write. You don’t have to be able to write every line it does, but just knowing what it’s doing will keep you from a lot of heartache in the future.
