"Vibe-coder Frontend Developer needed"

Original email from March 21, 2025.

Coder Vector by Vecteezy

I wish I was kidding.

Five minutes ago, I learned that ​the people at Getcoai are looking for a vibe-coding front-end developer​. And some of these lines on this job post are crazy.

• "Vibe your way to a brilliant front-end product!"

• "Collaborate with designers and product teams to translate vibes"

• "Prompt your way to MVP!"

My first thought was: "Man, that's sort of cringey 😅".

My second thought was: "You know what? This sort of job posting must probably be the first of its kind! The meme became an actual job posting. That's crazy!"

​But then I did one Google search and found that there's a "vibe coding" job board website already with similar job postings.​

And so, I had a mind shift I had to accept today.

What I once thought was a meme... is spreading. And becoming something companies actually want

That's... sort of... I don't know! Weird? Interesting? Sad? Insane?

I have a load of observations and thoughts I've been having lately that would be fun to just share as a stream-of-consciousness kind of email. But since I don't want to bore you (Curse our shorter attention spans!), here's what I've been thinking about lately in bullet form.

• For those who don't know what vibe coding is, ​it was a new term coined by the co-founder of OpenAI back in February.​ It's using LLMs and AI to the point where all code is 100% from prompts; you tell it what you need and if there's an error, you let it know and just use the new code. You're basically coding without really reviewing the code.
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• I like Andrej's tweet mentioning software like "Superwhisper," which lets him basically "talk" to the AI instead of typing anything. The term vibe coding always seemed forced and silly to me until I read this. Because honestly? The idea of putting on some music and working by just talking to your computer as it creates a fun project for you is, unironically, a vibe. ​I could imagine myself listening to Lofi while doing this.​
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• I'm also relieved to have learned that the original mention of the term was for it to be casual. To have fun, use it for "throwaway weekend projects," and not for more important, critical settings like production.
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• It's interesting to see what different people mean when they say "vibe-coding".
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  • The original definition used by Andrej is pretty close to being a fully "no-code" way of creating projects. You don't check the code. You just say what you need and let the AI do it for you. Repeat.
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  • Others sometimes use it to refer to coding with heavy assistance from AI. This is... I guess low-code? Where you don't exactly have an idea of how everything works, but you go for it either way. I heard somewhere the term "Yolo-coding," and well, yeah. That's how I'd define that. This is yolo-coding.
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  • Sometimes, I see vibe coding being used interchangeably for "devs who use AI for programming." This can muddy the conversation behind the original idea... but it's also probably a big part of why the term spread so quickly and is fun to talk about. "Vibe coding" is easier to say and write about as a concept than "developers who use AI sort of responsibly".
    

• I might be crazy for thinking this, but vibe-coding seems safer than yolo-coding. (See previous point on how I defined yolo-coding). When you have a process where you fully don't understand or look at the code, you know it can't be used in a serious production site.
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  Now, if it's a process where a newer dev says they sort of, kind of understand it, and they think that what the AI generated looks good?
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  ‎I dunno man, I'm scared a non-technical higher-up might also agree and go with it, too. Yolo all the way (I've never ever used Yolo seriously in my life and now I feel like I'm back in 2012)
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• There are two extremes to people's opinions I'm observing on the idea of vibe-coding.
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  • On one end, you have people saying, "IT'S THE FUTURE OF PROGRAMMING, YOU'RE ALL GOING TO LOSE YOUR JOBS, AI CAN DO EVERYTHING BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER!!". And then they go out and create really fast but pretty sloppy app store games with microtransactions.
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  • On the other, I see pretty senior tech people and non-AI enthusiasts be the voice of reason as always.
    

    • "Guys, please don't trust AI to write 95% of your production code."
      

    • "Okay fine, if you're going to do it anyway please heavily review it and think about best practices"
      

    • "AI is great, but useless for you if you don't know your fundamentals"
      

    • "Please be responsible with these shortcuts, learn by taking the long way around, and understand the pros and cons of shortcuts and when to take them."
      

• I've had an opinion on AI for a while that I don't think I've ever shared. Here it is:
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  • If you had to create software where you build it once and then never have to look at it again or change anything about it... it probably doesn't matter if you use AI or write pure spaghetti.
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    We try to create great code and follow best practices because we almost always want to change things later, share them with others, or make them grow.
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    But if we didn't, I mean, does it matter then?
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    That's why I'm seeing more and more use cases of Vibe coding for things like MVPs and prototypes. For this, I think it's fantastic where speed needs to beat quality to validate an idea or how it would look (before the real thing gets a chance to be built).
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• One of the worries I have for companies hiring "vibe-coding devs" is... well the end product is probably not going to be high quality.
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  • Some of the fundamental principles of software design include:

    • Scalability

    • Maintainability

    • Security

    • Accessibility

    • Efficiency

    • Performance

    • Testability
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  • I can't imagine a prompt where you get the AI to do what you need it to while also hitting all these fundamentals. Or it maintaining all those requirements with every new prompt.
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  • I've seen people go the vibe coding route for production and fail completely for security, as an example.
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• At the same time, "quality" probably isn't the goal.

  • The schtick with AI right now is "Speed over everything else." And so I can imagine hundreds of sloppily made games, apps, and web pages being built. A company like that makes money by going full quantity over quality with software and leveraging AI to its fullest. That's the trend we've been seeing so far everywhere else where AI has been used.

This is definitely one of my longer emails and pretty different from my normal style of storytelling. I wanted to take a moment to address this trend only because it's at the center of the AI revolution/crisis we're all feeling. And I think it's worth talking about it.

As a reward for reaching the end, here have a dog in a top hat.