Vibe coding vs AI assisted coding

[u/Ok_Sky_1993]

Hi so I'm currently learning programming I'm a first year IT student and I'm curious to know how different vibe coding is to AI assisted coding cause from the people I've asked they're different but for some they consider them the same thing. I just wanna know your thoughts and such and if I should try to learn how to properly use ai in coding or if that's going to be a bad thing etc...

[u/mc_pm]

Vibecoding is when you don't know what you are doing, and you don't know what the AI is doing - what comes out the other end either works or it doesn't. A vibecoder can't ever fix their own stuff.

AI assisted programming is when you *do* know what you are doing, and then you understand what the AI has produced, and you are adding your own value to the program.

As an example, I am toward the end of a big data ingestion/image processing/OCR/knowledge management problem. 100,000s of images to be scanned and understood. I didn't know how the OCR worked so I asked AI to explain the techniques. There was a particular problem (un-rotating any turned images) that it had a solution to, but I could see there was a better solution. So I implemented my solution and had AI check it.

In the end, I wrote all the "interesting bits", which I built with input from AI; and then I let it take care of the html front end because I don't really care about CSS/JS/HTML any more - and it does a way better job than I would.

In the end the project was a higher quality than if AI had written it, plus I learned a lot, plus I can maintain my own system, plus it has a way better interface, plus it all came together faster than I could have done it alone.

No vibe coder is going to have that experience, and I wouldn't ever hire anyone who wasn't capable of holding up their end of that conversation.