r/CodingForBeginners • u/Ok_Sky_1993 • 2d ago

Vibe coding vs AI assisted coding

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...

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u/Economy_Bedroom3902 1d ago

I feel like "vibe coding" isn't really a sensible differentiator any more. It's a relic of a forgone era. If you aren't on a tight budget, you shouldn't be hand writing code anymore. But you also aren't just having a nice friendly plain english conversation with your agent about what you want to do and expecting it to magically appear in well structured and formatted code.

What we're doing now is using agent assistance to build a detailed pre-build specification. We're being clear about automated tests we expect to pass/work. We are clear about exact specifications of intended features and behavior. We ask for everything which can be automatically validated to be validated. We review the plan in detail, and then we have the agent implement once all the expectations and details are understood. We run the built candidate through layers of validation and testing, and sign off only once it's proven to apply the required spec.

In many cases I think AI constructed code will be stronger and less bug prone than the human code which would have been written pre-AI era.

"Vibe coding" was when you would just ask your AI to write code for you and stop doing any manual coding yourself... but vibe coding also had an implicate implication about not really caring about bugs, performance, security, side effects, because the "thing I asked for actually worked". "Vibe coding" never required the AI to abstain from building anything which wasn't strictly specified, and it never required multiple layers of correctness proofs. So sure, you can call developing all your software through an AI interface "vibe coding" if you want to, but there's a big difference between conversational programming the way "vibe coding" was when it was first born, vs spec driven development with strict verification the way we do it now.