The term “vibe coding” comes from Andrej Karpathy, who in early 2025 described a way of building where you “fully give in to the vibes” and barely look at the code. It is a real thing, and it is genuinely useful for a weekend prototype. It is also the fastest way I know to ship a website that looks finished and quietly isn’t.
I use AI every day. It made me faster and, on balance, a better developer. But the kind of AI development I do for clients is not the same activity as vibe coding, even though it runs on the same models. The difference isn’t the tool. It is who stays responsible for the result.
What vibe coding actually is
You sit down with an AI editor, describe the site you want, and accept what comes back. You run it, it works, you ship it. No one read the authentication logic. No one chose the data model. No one can say why a particular function exists. It demos beautifully.
For some things, that is completely fine. A throwaway prototype, a tool you will rebuild anyway, a way to learn or test an idea in an afternoon. Vibe coding is a fast, useful tool for work that doesn’t have to last.
It stops being fine the moment the result handles real users, real money, or has to be maintained next year. Because the code works right up until it doesn’t, and then there is no one in the building who understands it.
What AI-assisted development is
Same models, different relationship. The AI drafts, I decide. I read every line that ships. I own the architecture, the security model, and the trade-offs that come with both. The AI is the fastest junior developer I have ever worked with and it never gets tired. It also has no judgment and no accountability. Those two things stay mine.
This isn’t slower-but-safer puritanism. I ship faster than I did three years ago. I just don’t ship code I don’t understand. That single rule is the line between the two ways of working.
The real difference: who can fix it when it breaks
Every website breaks eventually. A dependency updates, an edge case surfaces, traffic spikes, a form starts failing. The question that actually matters is simple: when that happens, does anyone understand the system well enough to fix it quickly?
With a vibe-coded site, the honest answer is often no. With AI-assisted development, the answer is yes, because a person made and understood the decisions the first time around.
| Dimension | Vibe coding | AI-assisted development |
|---|---|---|
| Who reviews the code | No one reads it | Every shipped line is read and understood |
| Who owns the architecture | The model picked it | A developer decided it on purpose |
| Security | Unchecked, hope for the best | Reviewed and reasoned about |
| When it breaks | Nobody knows why it worked | The person who built it can fix it |
| Good for | Prototypes, demos, throwaway tools | Sites that handle users, money, longevity |
| Cost when it fails | A rebuild, often from scratch | A fix, because the system is understood |
The role moved up, it didn’t disappear
Three years ago I spent most of my time typing solutions I already knew: a contact form, a responsive grid, an API integration, the hundredth variation of a layout. AI does that work now, in seconds, and it does it well. I am not nostalgic about it. That part was never where the value was.
So my time moved to the parts that always carried the value. Deciding what to build. How it should be structured. What can go wrong, and what happens when it does. What the client actually needs, which is often not the same as what they first ask for. The work shifted from production to direction.
I think of it less like coding now and more like directing and editing. I set the intent, the constraints, and the standard. The AI produces drafts against that. I review, correct, integrate, and put my name on the outcome. That is closer to an architect than a typist, and it is a bigger job, not a smaller one. The boring parts got automated and the parts that need a human got all of my attention.
Here is the split, concretely. AI is excellent at boilerplate, first drafts, translating between patterns I already know, remembering syntax, and grinding through refactors. What stays human is deciding it is the right thing to build at all, security judgment, performance trade-offs, taste, knowing when the model is confidently wrong, and being accountable to you when it ships.
Why this matters for you
You are not buying lines of code. You are buying a website that works, stays up, and that one identifiable person understands and can fix. That last part is easy to forget until something breaks.
A vibe-coded site can pass a demo and then fail in three predictable ways. Security holes nobody checked, because checking them requires reading code nobody read. Code nobody can maintain, so the first real change means a rebuild. And “looks done” hiding “isn’t done,” which is the most expensive one, because you find out in production. When you hire me, AI is in the room the whole time, but the judgment is human and the responsibility has a name.
How I actually use it
The order wizard on this site is a good example. AI helped me scaffold the conditional step logic fast, work that would have taken me a tedious afternoon by hand. But I designed the step flow myself, and I wrote the anti-spam honeypot and the prompt-injection handling on the user input by hand, because those are decisions with consequences and I wanted to own every one of them. The AI made the easy 70% quick. I spent the saved time on the 30% that actually decides whether the thing is safe.
GuardingWP, my WordPress security scanner, makes the point even more bluntly. You cannot vibe-code a tool whose entire job is catching the sloppiness that vibe coding produces. Building it well meant understanding every check it runs and why. AI helped me move faster through that. It could never have owned it.
This applies before a single line gets written, too. Choosing the right foundation is a judgment call AI can inform but not make for you, which is exactly what the static-vs-WordPress decision guide walks through.
The tool changed. The responsibility didn’t.
AI didn’t take the developer out of the loop. It put me where I am worth the most: deciding what gets built, making sure it holds up, and standing behind it. If you want a site built that way, here is how I work. Already know what you need? Start the order wizard.