Vibe code or retire

I hope this title ticked you off a bit. Get mad. Pound the table. Shake your head and then listen. You need to learn to vibe code, or your career as a software developer will end.

Vibe coding is a cute term for using the latest generation of code generation tools that use large language models (LLMs, or “ChatGPT” for the unwashed). There are a number of tools (all bad), such as Cursor, Codeline, and Tabnine, and now the granddaddy of them all, GitHub Copilot, is getting in on the game. Most are Visual Studio Code forks or plugins.

I am not saying that you, with no game coding experience, can just GPT out a game in a week or two and get the president to talk about it on his Twitter and become a millionaire, though stranger things… no, precisely that has happened before. I am not saying the tools are good or will not produce worse code with more security holes. I am saying that if you do not learn how to use them relatively soon, you will have to retire from the industry.

Same old story

This sort of thing has happened before. Near the start of my career, I met a developer, who we’ll call Tom. Tom was an old-school hunt-and-peck programmer I worked with in one of my first jobs. Tom could produce a report in Visual Basic every six months. I don’t know what language he knew before, but he learned VB from books. When he went on vacation, I finished the first report we were supposed to do together in a week and a half. I saved him a part to do, and Tom hated me for it from then on.

How did I do it so fast? I used the IDE and googled (before Google was a verb, or any good, and long before it got bad). When we switched to Java, I learned the new language (in about a week) from the Internet and learned JBuilder simultaneously. Tom bought Bruce Eckle’s Thinking in Java and hunted and pecked on his keyboard and thumped the Eckle book as a bible. Tom didn’t want to learn new ways of doing things; he wanted to scorn the world for the way it worked.

On LinkedIn there are two kinds of people. There are the people who were hawking web3 a year ago and who are making wild claims about vibe coding today. Then there are all the Toms, whining about security and the art of coding and everything else. If you are one of the Toms, you need to set your alarm. Learning new ways of doing things is part of the job description.

You write business software. You are not an artist or code poet. No one cares about “software craftsmanship.” Your boss is right—learn the new way of doing things and code faster. Or just do what Tom did after meeting a 20-something keyboard clacker who knew how to google—retire. That’s it. Vibe code or retire.

Are LLMs really that good? Yes. Can you generate complete applications? Yes. Will the output suck? Only if you do. You see, this is not a panacea. The new “you can do it without coding” isn’t any different from the last generation of “you can do it without coding” tools. They sort of work without coding, unless you need a 2.0 or something complicated. Just like before (nothing has changed), they are just faster and better.

Give it time

Your first application using vibe coding tools will be terrible, and you will find it frustrating, and you will be bad at it. That is not the tool’s problem. It is yours. This is partly because these tools have the maturity and stability of JBuilder, Visual Basic 4.2 (maybe not that bad), and JavaScript 1.0. When you use them, they do aberrant things that annoy you, and you want to rage quit. Then, you learn to adapt, work with them, and start being faster. If you’re even a little good at coding, they’ll slow you down after the initial scaffolding. You’ll shake your head at some of its decisions, and then you’ll learn to make it do what you want—just like with every new development tool or technology before it.

When you get the hang of it, you will have new skills. I can code, but I never really cared to learn JavaScript. Nevertheless, I have written a rather complex, extensive JavaScript application in under three weeks. I could have done all of it without the LLM, eventually, but searching for the right APIs and learning the extension points would have taken time—even with Google (before it got bad). What I’ve vibe coded would have taken me like three months. I’m not 10x with AI, but I’m 5x my usual productivity.

So, do you want to stay gainfully employed during the upcoming hyperinflation? Cool. Here are a few tips:

Start with the free version of Cursor, Codeline, or whatever—then pay at least $40. Watching the thing draw is not going to keep you moving.

Pick a problem you would code if you “had time,” like the fellow who solved his Zoom storage problem.

Use Git frequently. It is going to do some idiotic things, and you should be prepared.

Have a design discussion with the LLM before you code and have it output in Markdown. You can usually reference this in your vibe coding IDE’s “rules” settings, so you don’t have to keep reminding the model what you’re coding. Or you can feed it the Markdown when it forgets.

Verify each step and revert or undo when the model does something stupid.

Stick with it even when it frustrates you. You’ll learn how to make it work.

Use Claude 3.7 Sonnet (currently) or maybe Gemini 2.5 Pro (or Experimental) as your LLM.

Vibe coding is coming. This is how we will all write code in the future. Start learning it now—or retire.