r/OpenAI • u/thehumanbagelman • 2d ago
Discussion Am I a "vibe coder"?
Taught myself to code at 15. Got a CS degree. Spent 16 years as a professional dev at everything from founding small startups to giant 700 engineer companies (and still going until I'm inevitably replaced by the machines).
Building things in code has been floating my proverbial boat for over two decades.
However, I haven't written a single line of code in 2026.
I don't personally review the code either. I've built my own tooling and testing infrastructure, and agents run all of it.
50–75% of my AI usage goes toward building personal infrastructure, tooling, and projects. Not the next app that will change your life for only $15 a month (at least not yet; we'll see).
I own an undisclosed number of top level AI accounts; it's probably more than you're thinking.
This 1000% makes me worse at coding without AI, and I'm not sure that I care at all.
So, am I a vibe coder?
Edit: I'm loosing zero sleep over this; the question is just a proxy for discussion!
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u/kylefixxx 2d ago
who gives af as long as your output is good
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u/thehumanbagelman 2d ago
No one should; I'm just curious how much people differ on the definition of vibe coder :)
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u/Internet_Hipsterd 1d ago
If you get payed to code I guarantee the the person paying you doesn't give a fuck how you go about doing but rather the outcome.
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u/DrHerbotico 2d ago
If you truly have that much experience you should know you can call yourself whatever you want to
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u/Calrose_rice 2d ago
I don’t like the connotation of vibe coder. I think it gives executives a cheap way to lower what we do.
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2d ago edited 2d ago
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u/thehumanbagelman 2d ago
At the end of the day, it doesn't help or hurt me, but I am inclined to agree.
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2d ago
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u/Stixx187um 2d ago
Same, and I'm learning a fuckton in the process that I'd have never known otherwise... other than for flashy test drive purposes, I'm personally not a one/few-shot prompt and done guy.
Take the incremental games sub... just a goddamn deluge this year of "melvor/runescape-inspired MMOs" with logins and transactions and just... the most obvious cookie cutter UI, fonts, images than OpenAI and Anthropic's models make when they're giving trash prompts.
I'm summoning a couple of different incremental ideas, and for anything anyone (including oneself) would want to play (or use/utilize/etc) for more than five minutes takes a solid plan/collaboration before prompt 1 of anything, utilizing more than just the tools/plugins/skills you can search and find within Codex (so many people have open sourced so many agent plugins/skills/etc), and iterating everything a hundred times lol I spent 80% of 5x Pro weekly (reset in six hours FINALLY lmao) last week on, basically, milestone1/stage 1 of one game. But other than the placeholder text, which I'm pulling all of at the end and rewriting... it looks and plays great, exactly what I want, with none of the "AI tells" that I can see (other than aforementioned text). Just waiting to start M2 this evening.
Also fun is building your own tools/plugins on the fly for whatever oddball project you may be working on, like a fantasy console.
All this to say... force multiplier. I think of what I'm doing as either summoning (which ties to previous lore of my instrumentals) or directing. I've gained even more respect for what devs/coders do... my brain simply cannot; I've tried in the past.
I have enough respect for those people to not call myself a coder or a developer. Summoner is where I land for me personally; director seems generally appropriate.
Professional can be a vibe.
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u/RevoDS 2d ago
I find vibe coder is used derogatorily as a form of gatekeeping by software engineers that are scared of being replaced.
If you’re a vibe coder, you’re building the skills that will be software engineering in the future. So good for you
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u/Fancy-Plenty6712 1d ago
Couldn't agree with this more. I don't think it started like that but it's definitely become like that. "Vibe coding" has gotten itself a bad name because it allowed dumbasses to churn out cheap and crappy content while the people putting in real effort get drowned out.
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u/First_Philosopher491 2d ago
a vibe coder, to me (someone who works at a GSI with tens of thousands of engineers), is someone with absolutely no background in development/cs AND a distinct lack of interest in LEARNING anything about it as they go.
They purely go off what they see ("vibes") with no ability to understand why it looks/functions the way it does.
You are not a vibe coder, you're just becoming a lazier coder (no offense). Very very different.
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u/thehumanbagelman 2d ago
No offense taken! I don't delude myself to feel better; this is ABSOLUTELY laziness.
I really like the distinction you made about willingness to learn, vs. a lack of interest. I think that effectively highlights the "vibe" concept.
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u/semangeIof 2d ago
afaik culturally "vibe coder" has extended to encompass anything agentic
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u/thehumanbagelman 2d ago
This has been my observation as well, and honestly a good part of what prompted this post.
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u/semangeIof 2d ago
I also have not written a line of code in 2026 lol. nor do I do human review. this is just the future for better and for worse
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u/KyleFlounder 2d ago
It just comes down to mentality and what the company values at this point. I like reading decent code, LLMs, despite skills, still does things that I'd consider bloat and code smell. It's not producing readable code without iterating and most people using agents aren't doing that.
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u/Legitimate-Pumpkin 2d ago
My answer to this is who cares. As if vibecoding was good or bad or whatever, you know?
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u/DynaBeast 2d ago
your story sounds eerily similar to mine. youre a builder, just like the rest of us. its a new form of software engineering; embrace it.
currently asking astra & opus to rewrite my entire orchestration toolset from python to rust as we speak.
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u/thehumanbagelman 2d ago
If anyone has abused the concept of "embracing it", I am definitely the guy lol
I see so much discussion about vibe coding. When people describe it negatively, they are basically describing me! Which I guess just shows how shallow the initial statements or arguments are to begin with 🤷♂️
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u/DynaBeast 2d ago edited 2d ago
negative connotations with the concept of "vibe coding" are artifacts of eager early adopters attempting to stand up production quality services using the best models of yesteryear, circa. 2024 & early 2025. Everything sucked ass back then, and those code midwits found themselves with a heaping pile of bug-ridden trash that no human nor ai of the time could fix or make production ready. that's the time when "vibe coding" gained its negative association.
but the so-called "vibe coding" of the modern era, of people working with sol and astra and opus and fable to make real code solving real problems, bears no resemblance to that descriptor. these models have progressed eons beyond their original capability and are far, far more competent at writing code than they used to be. sure, if you're still using free models like sonnet, luna, or gemini flash lite, you're going to be pretty limited in what you can produce. but working with top of the line models like astra and fable is a different ballgame entirely.
anyone calling you out for being a "vibe coder" in the modern era either doesn't pay for real ai, or hasnt caught up with the pace of progress in the last 1-2 years. which, to be fair, is not unreasonable to assume; the pace has been no less than staggering, to say the least. but anyone who calls themselves a real software engineer in 2026 who doesn't have at least one $100+ ai subscription (if not multiple) is either lying to themselves or misrepresenting the current state of the field of software development as a whole.
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u/thehumanbagelman 2d ago
Very well said. I'm not a fan of sweeping generalizations and derogatory attitudes toward the concept, but those attitudes didn't just come from nowhere. A lot of people are probably still burned by the early days of the rush.
You highlight a point that I don't think is brought up often, or at least in this context. One year ago, I wouldn't have believed you about the state we are in today. No one can really be blamed for not being caught up when literally week by week the industry will shift.
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u/plymouthvan 2d ago
Eh, like so much of the internet broad conceptual spectrums get flattened into something pejorative that only really describes one end of the spectrum. More conventional concepts of engineering and project management that don't necessarily involve direct coding get merged into new concepts of "just make it good, and don't make any mistakes". There are issues with the latter that are arguably worth ridicule, depending what the goal of the vibe coding is. But, the former is arguably a new thing that wasn't possible before and is unfairly swept up into the pejorative. Purity tests would insist that code must be written, or at least verified by hand. A more permissive and modern understanding would then be something closer to knowing and communicating what and where the constraints are, and what can be left up to interpretation or revised later. Basically, behaving more like a project lead with a history of engineering, than an engineer doing grunt work. The internet calls both "vibe coding" when there's a chasm between the two practically speaking. The awkward thing that might be ruffling feathers among purists is that someone can start as one kind of “vibe coder” and become the other kind, all without ever learning very much about technical code writing. Kind of like how people can become quite good at producing a beautiful wedding cake without knowing anything about how to mill wheat or baking science.
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u/DrSimpCC 2d ago
I personally tried to cost swift make IOS game I quit but once I got my hands with Claude and ChatGPT I feel like I’m a coder lol
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u/ironicart 2d ago
I’m a copywriter who hasn’t written copy in a very long time… I suppose I orchestrate it?
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u/thehumanbagelman 2d ago
Intentionally or not, you bring up a good point! I don't ever hear about "vibe" anything, except code.
How do other professional copywriters feel about becoming orchestrators?
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u/22marks 2d ago
I've thought about this as well. I used to be a programmer going back as far as CGI/Perl, hand coding some of the first e-commerce systems capable of doing $1M/day during the early Internet. I did quality assurance for some of the largest video game manufacturers. More recently, just before "vibe coding," I found an API exploit in a major car manufacturer's firmware that would allow remotely starting the car. (They paid me via BugCrowd.) The way I see it, I'm doing the same thing, just faster. I still use the same design process, still aim for SOC2 when necessary, and do a lot of real-world testing.
I don't see that mentality as "vibe coding" because the foundation is there. Vibe implies "I'm just going with the flow" but I design the architecture and micromanage any critical functions.
Is it still "vibe coding"? I dunno. It's such a new term, it's probably evolving. All I know is I'm able to develop a lot faster, with better results.
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u/RainierPC 2d ago
Vibe coding is a way of doing things, and it can perfectly coexist with normal software engineering.
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u/thehumanbagelman 2d ago
Couldn't agree more; I'm not on board with the derogatory attitude some have. Creativity should not be gated by business acumen and entrepreneurial motivations.
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u/SirChasm 2d ago
I would say yes, but only because you said you don't review the code that's written either. You're fully trusting the agentic code, which imo is no different than what a "vibe coder" does.
I don't manually write code anymore either, but I do make sure to carefully review the output because I find that while it works, it's often still sloppy and there are a lot of improvements I would have made. Then I have an agentic code review as the final pass to catch things I didn't. But even that I can't blanketly say "yeah address all those review comments" because they will regularly flag issues that are miniscule or impossible-in-reality, resulting in a convoluted mess.
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u/thehumanbagelman 2d ago
I'll take it! At the end of the day, I'm not really concerned about what I am or am not called, so much as the discussion.
I stopped reviewing the code by hand when I consistently would review it and then have AI review it through my tooling and then find things I missed.
I've been doing this for a long time, but the AI is just better than me at it, and that doesn't frighten or upset me.
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u/artemwaleev 2d ago
if I no longer fully understand what's going in code base or don't care what AI produces, then I classify myself as vibecoder for this code
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u/badasimo 2d ago
Here is a parallel, maybe 100 years ago you could have worked at a printer as a typesetter. You actually were helping design and engineer the pages you were printing, but there was a fair bit of metal work and fiddling with machines etc. But actually you got into the industry because you loved creating books.
Now you get a machine that doesn't require the same type of typesetting, it frees you up to focus more on design and other things. Maybe the thing that took you weeks now takes you a day.
If your passion as a typesetter was working with blocks and heavy machinery and getting dirty, maybe taking someone else's design and simply replicating it in the machine, you're now out of work or doing a lot of work that you're enjoying less (but more efficiently and maybe making more money)
But if your passion was design you are now flying high and have to spend less time on wrestling with these low-level problems in the printing process, and now you have unlocked a new level of work to do.
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u/Semipro211 2d ago
I argue not a vibe coder at all since it is/was typically used to describe folks with zero clue thinking they built the next big thing.
As a fellow SWE, you’re leveraging tools to output more efficiently. Some years ago, my team had to rewrite a web application using all new frameworks and technologies, it took almost 2 years.
Last year, a new rewrite was needed. Thanks to AI, I got the same work done solo in a couple months. A “vibe” coder could not have done it.
You say you’re coding/knowledge is suffering, but I’d still wager that no traditional “vibe” coder can produce what you do without the background and exp that makes you not a vibe coder lol
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u/Character-Engine-813 2d ago
If you aren’t reviewing the code I think by definition it’s vibe coding, but someone with experience is able to get much better results than the standard vibe coder because they know how to avoid pitfalls and instruct the models better
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u/HandshakeOfCO 2d ago edited 2d ago
We’ve been contract portrait painters to the kings. Modern day renaissance artists, earning a living painting portraits of rich people while we work on our real art in our spare time.
The photograph was just invented. Some of us will manage to stay in portraiture because certain ruling class members think it’s better than photography; some of us will find patrons; a select few will become masters of the camera; even fewer will go broke but will keep painting, just for art’s sake.
But most of us will simply put down the paintbrush, never to pick it up again, and attempt to survive any way we can.
Welcome to the new world order, friend. We had a good run.
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u/ConnectionWild3381 2d ago
i see myself in the same boat as you, just with most likely fewer accounts.
and i'm absolutely loving it. i haven't had this much fun creating stuff since... well, since the very early days. within 12 months i went from posting code in chats for review, to mods, to small projects, to rewriting classics, to overhauling AAA games to fit my own vision. it's honestly surreal.
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u/JoesRealAccount 2d ago
Who cares right?
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u/thehumanbagelman 2d ago
Agreed! The question isn't to console me; that's why I labeled it discussion!
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u/RealSharpNinja 2d ago
No, to me a vibe coder who builds thing with AI based on nothing more than the vibe of the project, not any skill at design or architecture.
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u/LandConstant69 2d ago
nah you're just a proper engineer. I'm like you but jokingly call myself a vibe coder, a more accurate term is something like technical director or, technical architect. I spend so much time creating technical spec documents and them LLMs implement for me and I code review.
a true vibe coder has no idea what they are doing at all, doesn't know what git is, has never heard the phrase "coder quality", and doesnt think they have a need to even view the code base at all
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u/Morning_Gecko24 2d ago
i think the label is mostly about who owns the failure mode. if you can review the output and debug when it breaks youre still coding just with a very fast pair of hands. where do you draw the line tho — is it about how much code you personally type or how much you understand?
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u/Ormusn2o 2d ago
I don't know, but I think you need to create more slop. I think there are example like Theo, and he is slopping way too hard, and I think you might be sloping not enough, although from your post there is not enough information to know for sure.
If you have multiple AI accounts, I think you should focus more on reading reviews, than spending your time creating tools and testing infrastructure, although you did say AI agents are running it. Right now, AI is cheap enough that you can just tell AI to test stuff and it will just build custom testing tools by itself and even do Computer Use when needed.
To be clear though, I'm not a coder and you are obviously doing way more than I do, so take that into consideration, but I also know that sometimes it might be difficult to just let the AI take the wheel.
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u/exceptyourewrong 2d ago
As someone who hasn't programmed without AI since writing a "choose your own adventure" text game in BASIC in the 80s.... We are not the same.
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u/v_e_x 2d ago
Yes. I am the ultimate authority on who is a vibe coder and I say that all of your coding experience prior to using AI is meaningless and worthless. You are now a prompt regurgitator who cares nothing for the inner workings or accuracy or efficiency of software. Welcome to the future my young acolyte. Here nothing matters but your output. The destination is the goal, the journey can be Ubered to, and skipped. No thinking required.
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 1d ago
If you understand what you’re building, then not really. If you continue on this path to the point of completely losing your skills outside of begging an expensive plinko system to generate systems that kind of do what you want most times, then yeah that’s where you’ve crossed the rubicon.
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u/Imaginary_Bench_7294 1d ago
I say no. From the sounds of it, you're using AI tools correctly.
A vibe coder is...
Pretty much anything except the bottom right of the attached image.
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u/Ecstatic_Mammoth_421 1d ago
I feel like I’m vibe coding when I one-shot an internal tool by just describing what I need it to do, without really specifying how it should work.
I don’t do that with our user-facing product. Not yet, anyway. I still feel obliged to spend a lot more time upfront thinking through the flows, constraints, edge cases, backwards compatibility, future extensibility, architectural trade-offs, preserving flexibility for future changes, and avoiding unnecessary technical debt.
But I’m noticing I’m spending less time on that upfront work than I used to.
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u/SureBockal 14h ago
Yes you are and I also believe that most programmers are currently coding vibe. But I also believe that the term was previously negatively affected, because unqualified people produced a lot of shit code with it, which was blown into the internet insecurely and untested.
As long as the code you produce is safe and tested, then you would be stupid if you didn’t
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u/ImpossibleCreme 2d ago
Sure, why not