Vibe Coding with AI: From Bootstrapping to Burnout

There was a time when “vibe coding” meant writing code without a plan, just momentum, coffee, and Stack Overflow tabs.
We all did it. Especially during our bootcamp days or early dev careers. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked… eventually.

Fast forward to 2025, and now “vibe coding” has evolved.
Only this time, it’s wearing a clean UI, spitting out perfect syntax, and calling itself “AI-assisted development.”

Let’s call it what it really is:

You’re not coding anymore. You’re vibe coding with a robot sidekick, and pretending it’s engineering.

🧠 What Vibe Coding Used to Mean

It wasn’t strategic. It wasn’t elegant. It was raw.

You wrote code:

Without fully understanding the language
Without thinking about edge cases
Without testing until you broke something

You Googled every error.
You copied code snippets and prayed they worked.
You logged everything because actual debugging was a dark art.

But here’s the thing: you learned.
Even if you failed 100 times, you were still building your own mental map of how code behaves.
That grit? It made you a developer.

🤖 What Vibe Coding Looks Like Now with AI

AI changed the surface, but not the behavior.

Now vibe coders just:

Prompt Copilot or ChatGPT to “generate code for X”
Paste the result into their IDE
Run it without reading
Prompt again when it fails
Repeat until something sticks

No tests. No understanding. No logic.

It feels productive.
But here’s the dark truth:

You’re not debugging code anymore, you’re debugging prompts.
You’re not solving problems, you’re outsourcing your thinking.

⚠️ The Dangerous Side of AI-Powered Vibe Coding

Let’s break down why this is not just lazy, it’s dangerous.

1. You Lose Ownership

You didn’t write the logic. You can’t explain it.
You just know it “runs.”

Until someone asks why it works that way.
Then you freeze, because you never asked that question yourself.

2. You Can’t Debug What You Don’t Understand

This isn’t just a dev problem.
From a QA standpoint, this is a nightmare.

We broke this down in Manual vs Automation Testing: A QA Lead’s Perspective:
Dev teams shipping fragile AI-generated code lead to brittle automation suites and manual testers stuck in regression hell.

And if QA pushes back?
They get labeled “slow” or “blockers” while devs prompt their way into production bugs.

3. You’re Just Delaying the Burn

AI-generated code often lacks:

Edge case coverage
Context awareness
Scalable structure

In real-world pipelines (like we explored in How I Use Playwright to Boost QA), this turns staging into a minefield of false positives, flaky tests, and CI/CD failures nobody understands.

So yeah. You shipped fast.
But now the QA team is on fire, and the PM is being blamed for a feature that barely works.

🦳 Back Then, You Had to Earn It

Let me be clear. I didn’t “learn to code” on a browser-based playground or with AI suggestions whispering in my ear.

I learned to code in the ’90s, when documentation came as thick books, not instant links.

I started with C and Assembly. To this day, registers like AX and DX still mess with my head.

We didn’t have YouTube tutorials. We had Norton programming books found in used bookstores, with missing pages and notes from the last frustrated owner.

When I was younger, even batch scripting felt like magic. My dad handed me a copy of autoexec.bat and told me to design my own boot-up menu. That was our “GUI”.

Then came Visual Basic 6. It felt like a revolution. I saved up to buy books for it too. I wasn’t Googling how to create a form, I was flipping through manuals like I was solving a puzzle.

📆 It’s Easier Than Ever to Build, But Harder Than Ever to Grow

These days, it’s almost too easy to build something that looks impressive.

You can:

Clone open-source projects
Modify the UI
Follow along with YouTube or ChatGPT
Deploy to Netlify or Vercel in a day

That’s great for your portfolio.
It gets you noticed.
It might even land you an interview.

But let’s be honest:

You’re still building on someone else’s brain.

What matters is whether you understand:

Why that architecture was chosen
What happens when scale breaks it
How to debug when your version behaves differently
Where the tradeoffs are between flexibility, performance, and readability

💡 Bootstrapping Isn’t New, We’ve Always Done It

We’ve been bootstrapping since the beginning.

Even in the ’90s, we started from templates, just lower-level ones:

autoexec.bat menu scripts
C header files from books
Form templates in VB6

But back then, there was no safety net.
No internet to ask. No Discord to consult. No “copy-paste this to fix.”

So we had to understand, or it didn’t run.
That pain is what gave developers their reputation.

Programming wasn’t a job title. It was a craft.

🪶 The Devs Who Stand Out Now Still Build That Way

Despite all the tools, tutorials, and AI copilots, the best devs I know today don’t just build apps,
They build mental models.

They use AI, yes.
They use templates, yes.
But they understand what every line does.
And they never let the tool make the decision for them.

🌟 Vibe Coding Isn’t the Enemy, Misusing It Is

Don’t get me wrong, vibe coding got me through a lot of real projects.

I used it to survive Ruby on Rails sprints.
I built half-functional JavaScript features with it.
I scraped by when I didn’t fully understand how things worked, because I was determined to learn as I went.

For a while, vibe coding was my gateway drug into real development.

The problem wasn’t the approach.
The problem was treating it as the destination, not the entry point.

Eventually, I got tested—formally.
And I broke.

I didn’t know enough to hold the weight of the job I wanted.
Not because I was dumb. But because I mistook “working code” for “understood code.”

I learned from that. I bounced back. I rebuilt, this time with intent, not just instinct.

⚖️ Use AI and Vibe Coding to Learn, Not to Escape

So if you’re reading this thinking I’m against AI or anti-vibe coding, you’re missing the point.

I’m not.

I’m against using AI as a crutch to avoid learning.
I’m against vibe coding as a shortcut when you never plan to revisit the basics.

But if you use vibe coding as a starting point, as a means to get unstuck, to build curiosity, to break the blank screen?

Then that’s not failure.
That’s growth.

Just know when to drop the vibe, and pick up the discipline.

🚨 Final Thought

We’re raising a generation of developers who can write a prompt but can’t trace a bug.
Who can generate CRUD but can’t handle conflict resolution.
Who think AI is a shortcut to seniority, when it’s just a crutch.

Vibe coding didn’t die.
It just put on a clean UI and got a GitHub badge.

Stop vibe coding with AI. Start building with intention.

Your QA team will thank you.
Your PM will survive a sprint.
And you? You’ll actually grow.

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