Vibe Coding

February 23, 2026

There’s a specific feeling that’s hard to describe. You open your editor, you have a rough idea, and then — almost without thinking — something starts to take shape. You’re not grinding through syntax or fighting documentation. You’re just… building. Brewing. Flowing.

That’s vibe coding. And I am completely hooked.

What even is vibe coding?

The term gets thrown around loosely, but at its core, vibe coding is what happens when AI handles the mechanical friction of programming — and you get to stay in the idea space. You describe what you want, you react to what appears, you steer, you refine. It’s less like writing code and more like having a conversation with a very capable collaborator who never gets tired and never judges your ideas.

Think of it as the stages you cycle through in a single session: you start brewing — barely formed thoughts, a vague direction. Then you’re imagining the shape of the solution. Ideating out loud. Puzzling through the gaps. Sussing out whether the approach even makes sense. Before long, you’re tinkering, determining, manifesting something real. And somehow — almost without noticing — you’re vibing.

It’s a flow state, but one you can actually get into in under ten minutes.

The productivity is genuinely wild

I want to be honest here: the productivity gains are not subtle. They’re not “10% faster” gains. They’re order of magnitude shifts.

Things I used to block out half a day for — scaffolding a new feature, writing boilerplate, setting up config, connecting a new integration — now take twenty minutes. Ideas that would have stayed in the backlog forever because the effort didn’t feel worth it now get shipped in an afternoon.

That’s not me being hyperbolic. That’s just what happens when you remove the friction between thinking and doing.

The tools that made this possible for me — Claude Code in the terminal, Cursor in the editor — don’t just autocomplete. They understand context. They remember what we were working on. They suggest the next logical step. They explain what they’re doing and why. They push back when something seems off.

Mustering ideas that would have been too ambitious to even attempt now feels reasonable. The sky really does feel closer.

Growing as a developer

Here’s what surprised me most: I’m learning more, not less.

There’s a fear that AI coding tools make you lazy — that you stop understanding what’s happening and just become a prompt monkey. I’ve found the opposite. Because I’m shipping more, I’m exploring more. I’m reading the code that gets generated, asking why it was written that way, refactoring when I disagree. I’m encountering patterns I wouldn’t have reached on my own for months.

Vibe coding has made me a more curious developer. When you’re not spending all your energy on syntax and boilerplate, you have energy left to actually think about architecture, trade-offs, and edge cases. The intellectual part of the job gets more room, not less.

It also forces you to get better at articulating what you want. Writing a clear prompt is a skill. Knowing when the output is wrong and why is a skill. Steering a conversation toward a good solution — rather than just accepting the first thing that appears — is a skill. These are not trivial. They’re just different from the skills we used to optimize for.

The security risks are real — don’t skip this part

I’d be doing you a disservice if I only wrote about the highs.

Vibe coding in full flow means moving fast. And moving fast with code you haven’t fully read is how you introduce vulnerabilities you don’t notice until much later. AI models are excellent at producing working code. They are less excellent at consistently producing secure code — especially when you haven’t specified your security requirements clearly, or when the model makes plausible-but-wrong assumptions about your environment.

The risks I’ve bumped into or actively watch for:

• Unvalidated inputs — AI code often trusts data it shouldn’t. Check every system boundary.
• Overly permissive access — generated IAM roles, DB queries, and API configs can be too broad if you don’t explicitly constrain them.
• Dependencies you didn’t vet — models sometimes suggest packages or versions with known issues.
• Secrets in code — it happens. Always review before committing.
• Logic that looks right but isn’t — the most dangerous kind, because it passes the vibe check.

The antidote isn’t to slow down and stop vibing. It’s to be deliberate about when you review versus when you flow. Build security into your prompts. Ask the model to think about attack surface. Read the generated code at the end of each session — not line by line during it, but as a review before it ships.

This is just the beginning

Vibe coding isn’t a trend that’s going to fade. It’s a shift in how software gets made — one that’s still unfolding. The tools are improving faster than most people realize. The gap between what an experienced developer can produce in an afternoon and what required a full team a few years ago is closing rapidly.

That is both exciting and worth thinking about seriously.

What I know is this: the developers who lean into this shift — who unfurl their curiosity, who stay engaged with what the AI produces rather than just accepting it, who pair their domain knowledge with AI’s speed — are going to build things that weren’t possible before.

We’re in the simmering phase of something much larger. The ideas are forming. The tools are sharpening.

I’m here for it.