Well, some people will do what you do: Use the tool carefully and verify everything. That will work. But that is not really what people mean by "Vibe Coding". What they mean is that AI does all the heavy lifting
It's not just coding. I have a friend who uses it verbatim, so he claims, for market analysis and preparing marketting materials. Based on my experience, I would be surprised f it actually produced the quality he claims. When I said my experimenting with it produced outcomes that were sort of correct, useful to id areas to look at but not ready to send out un reviewed, especially since its prose was stilted and full of superlatives. He said the problem was my prompts and that it can't be the AI because it is so smart and knows everything. While I agree my prompt writing skills are rudimentary, I don't buy into the so smart it doesn't need human intervention.
. In your approach, you do all the mental heavy lifting and the AI does all the lookup stuff. Hence the AI helps you one time-consuming but easy stuff, and that is perfectly fine as you do the heavy mental work of verifying it got it right. Your experience with ChatGPT shows how needed that part you supply is. I also expect this will not make you faster.
Perhaps, but it can speed up the learning process since it is always available so yu get instant feedback; something communities don't. While my coding isn't faster and may actually be slower since I need to understand and digest what it is recommending, but it has cut down on total time by reducing he time spent waiting for a response or endlessly searching the web for a answer.
But it allows you to do things you understand with a tool that you are less familiar with. That is definitely a good thing, but I would classify it essentially under "better search". It fails for just a bit more advanced code, by my own observations and by feedback from many students. So if you can break down things enough and check what gets proposed, it is a definite help. But only then.
Your better search point is spot on. For me, the biggest help was identifying concepts I may never have stumbled across in web searches or community forums; and the ability for it to explain how they worked. It also often offered multiple approaches and explained where they were a good fit based on what was being done; and never tires of being asked questions. It's also great at explaining error messages.
I have no idea how great the code is it writes, and grey beards may scoff at how inelegant it is and have better ways to do it; but it but it has helped me be more efficient and clean up my code to make it better. As a result, I created our app in far less time with better code than without it.
The thing is, however (and I expect you have noticed this), that most people are mentally lazy. Hence many people will do Vibe Coding without the careful verification and learning (!) process you describe. In fact, many people using Vibe Coding will not be able to code competently in any language and will barely understand the problem they try to solve. And that is a recipe for disaster.
Very true; and failure will be blame on AI. I shudder when I think of what the code will look like that will be written by junior consultants, using AI, employed by the big consulting firms. One thing I do know is their rates or total hours charged will not change.
