
'There is No Vibe Engineering' 106
Software engineer Sergey Tselovalnikov weighs in on the new hype: The term caught on and Twitter quickly flooded with posts about how AI has radically transformed coding and will soon replace all software engineers. While AI undeniably impacts the way we write code, it hasn't fundamentally changed our role as engineers. Allow me to explain.
[...] Vibe coding is interacting with the codebase via prompts. As the implementation is hidden from the "vibe coder", all the engineering concerns will inevitably get ignored. Many of the concerns are hard to express in a prompt, and many of them are hard to verify by only inspecting the final artifact. Historically, all engineering practices have tried to shift all those concerns left -- to the earlier stages of development when they're cheap to address. Yet with vibe coding, they're shifted very far to the right -- when addressing them is expensive.
The question of whether an AI system can perform the complete engineering cycle and build and evolve software the same way a human can remains open. However, there are no signs of it being able to do so at this point, and if it one day happens, it won't have anything to do with vibe coding -- at least the way it's defined today.
[...] It is possible that there'll be a future where software is built from vibe-coded blocks, but the work of designing software able to evolve and scale doesn't go away. That's not vibe engineering -- that's just engineering, even if the coding part of it will look a bit different.
[...] Vibe coding is interacting with the codebase via prompts. As the implementation is hidden from the "vibe coder", all the engineering concerns will inevitably get ignored. Many of the concerns are hard to express in a prompt, and many of them are hard to verify by only inspecting the final artifact. Historically, all engineering practices have tried to shift all those concerns left -- to the earlier stages of development when they're cheap to address. Yet with vibe coding, they're shifted very far to the right -- when addressing them is expensive.
The question of whether an AI system can perform the complete engineering cycle and build and evolve software the same way a human can remains open. However, there are no signs of it being able to do so at this point, and if it one day happens, it won't have anything to do with vibe coding -- at least the way it's defined today.
[...] It is possible that there'll be a future where software is built from vibe-coded blocks, but the work of designing software able to evolve and scale doesn't go away. That's not vibe engineering -- that's just engineering, even if the coding part of it will look a bit different.