even legit coders are being forced to vibe code
Something shifted in the last year and I don't think we've named it properly yet.
Spots 
I know a lot of developers. Not Twitter
I know a lot of developers. Not Twitter developers, real ones. People who've been writing code for a decade, who read source code for fun, who can debug a memory leak by staring at a heap dump. Serious people.
Eighteen months ago they laughed at Copilot. Twelve
Eighteen months ago they laughed at Copilot. Twelve months ago they tolerated it. Six months ago they started using it quietly. Today some of them are shipping features they don't fully understand, generated by tools they don't fully trust, into codebases they're responsible for, because if they don't, the person next to them will. Nobody says this out loud. Not in standups, not in performance reviews. But it's happening.
The pressure isn't coming from managers saying "use
The pressure isn't coming from managers saying "use AI or else." It's subtler. It's the junior who joined six months ago shipping features at a rate that doesn't make sense. It's the team down the hall that went from four engineers to three and is somehow shipping faster. It's the recruiter who asks in the screening call whether you're "comfortable with modern AI tooling" and everyone knows what that means. The market decided something before any of us had time to have an opinion about it.
Here's the honest part. I've been writing code
Here's the honest part. I've been writing code for years. I trust my instincts. I can read a stack trace and know what's wrong before I open the file. That's a skill that took a long time to build and I'm proud of it.
And yet. In the last six months there
And yet. In the last six months there have been moments where I opened Cursor, described what I wanted, and got a working implementation before I would've finished typing the first function signature by hand.
Not always. Not for anything subtle. But for
Not always. Not for anything subtle. But for the boring 70 percent of code that is CRUD and glue and boilerplate and wiring, yes. Every time.
So I use it. I use it reluctantly
So I use it. I use it reluctantly, and I use it while feeling like I'm cheating at something that used to be a fair game, and I use it while knowing that the thing it's good at is exactly the thing that pays my bills.
The phrase "vibe coding" bothered me when I
The phrase "vibe coding" bothered me when I first heard it. It sounds unserious. It sounds like somebody describing playing with a toy. Then I watched a friend of mine, a senior engineer at a large company, describe a feature to Claude, paste the result into his editor, tweak two lines, and commit. He didn't read most of it. He didn't need to. It worked.
He's not a bad developer. He's a very
He's not a bad developer. He's a very good one. He just figured out that reading every line of generated code is the same as reading every line of a library you installed. Nobody does that. You trust it or you don't. The line I keep hearing, and I've started repeating, is: AI won't take your job. Someone who uses AI better will.
News
even legit coders are being forced to vibe code
Something shifted in the last year and I don't think we've named it properly yet.
@spots #dev
Source: Dev.to