# Vibe Coding: When AI-First Development Works and When It Does Not

Source: https://www.techinterview.org/post/3233475096/vibe-coding-ai-first-development/
Updated: 2026-05-05 · techinterview.org

"Vibe coding" — the term Andrej Karpathy popularized in early 2025 for writing software primarily by prompting an AI assistant — has become a mainstream practice and a source of strong opinions. Some teams build remarkable products this way; others end up with brittle, opaque codebases. The interview question "what do you think of vibe coding?" probes whether you can articulate the tradeoffs.

## What vibe coding actually means

The user describes the desired behavior; the AI generates code; the user runs it; if it works, ship; if not, iterate via prompts rather than reading the code. The user may rarely look at the code itself.

This is different from AI-assisted coding (where you write code with AI help and read every line). Vibe coding shifts the human attention from "every line is reviewed" to "the behavior is verified."

## When it works

- Prototypes and proof-of-concepts

- Internal tools with one or two users

- Glue scripts and one-shot data transformations

- Small apps with low stakes (personal automation, learning projects)

- UI exploration where the goal is "does this layout feel right?"

For these, behavior verification is sufficient. The code being unreviewed is a reasonable trade for speed.

## When it falls apart

- Production systems with real users

- Code that needs to be maintained for years

- Security-sensitive code

- Code that integrates with external systems and depends on edge-case handling

- Performance-critical code

For these, "does it pass the tests" is insufficient. Subtle bugs survive surface verification. Maintenance becomes painful when no human understands why the code works.

## The maintenance problem

Six months later, you need to change something. The code was generated by a different prompt; now you do not remember the context. The model that produced it has been updated; the same prompt produces different output. You ask the AI to modify the code; the new version subtly breaks something the old version did. Without anyone reading the code, you cannot tell what changed.

## Hybrid approaches

Most pragmatic: vibe code the first draft; review and refactor before committing. Specifically:

- Use AI to generate the structure

- Read every line before merging to main

- Refactor for clarity, naming, and idiom

- Add tests that verify behavior, not implementation

- Document non-obvious choices

The goal is to keep the speed advantage of AI generation while preserving the code's maintainability.

## The "AI knows my codebase" failure

Even when the AI has access to your codebase, it does not have the unwritten knowledge: why the team chose pattern X, what the historical decisions were, what is unsafe to change. Vibe coding works best in greenfield where the AI is filling a blank slate.

## Senior engineer perspective

Senior engineers in 2026 use vibe coding for:

- Quickly testing an idea before committing to it

- Generating boilerplate that they then edit

- Translating between languages or frameworks

- Bootstrapping new tools when the upfront understanding is low-stakes

They do not vibe code production systems. They review every line that ships.

## Junior engineer trap

Juniors who only vibe code never develop the muscle of reading and reasoning about code. After two years, they can prompt fluently but cannot debug a real production issue. Career ceiling: relatively low, until they invest in fundamentals.

## The interview probe

"How do you balance AI-driven coding with maintainability?"

Strong answers:

- Acknowledge AI-driven coding is here to stay

- Distinguish prototypes from production

- Describe a specific review/refactor practice

- Give an example of when vibe coding helped and when it hurt

## Frequently Asked Questions

### Is vibe coding a "fad" or here to stay?

Here to stay for prototyping. The split between vibe coding (prototypes) and rigorous AI-assisted coding (production) is the durable pattern.

### Can I vibe code my way to a senior role?

You can vibe code your way to a job at a low-rigor team. You cannot vibe code your way through a senior interview at a serious company.

### What did Karpathy actually say about it?

His tweet was relatively neutral — describing his own practice, not making it doctrine. The hype around the term outran his original framing.