One Year of Vibecoding and Other Questionable Life Choices

You start vibecoding because someone told you it feels like magic. You imagine floating through code. You picture yourself whispering prompts and watching perfection unfold. Reality does not care about your imagination.

After one year of this, I have learned some things. Mostly that I should have listened to my mother when she said I should have been a lawyer.

The Honeymoon Phase

It started beautifully. I would type something vaguely coherent into a chatbot and it would generate code that mostly worked. "Wow," I thought. "This is the future." The future, it turns out, has a lot of edge cases.

The code that looked perfect would break in production. The elegant solutions would turn into spaghetti when viewed under the harsh light of 3 AM debugging sessions. The AI would confidently tell me that yes, this definitely works, and I would confidently believe it, and we would both be wrong.

Vibecoding is like being in a relationship with someone who is very smart but also very lying. You want to trust them. They keep giving you reasons not to.

The Realization

Here is what nobody tells you about vibecoding: you still need to know what you are doing. The AI is a tool, not a replacement for understanding. It can write the code, but it cannot architect the solution. It can debug, but it cannot understand your business logic. It can generate tests, but it cannot guarantee your product makes sense.

After a year, I am a better developer. Not because the AI did the work for me, but because I learned to guide it, to review its output critically, to understand what it was doing and why it was sometimes very, very wrong.

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