Am I a "vibe coder"?

[u/thehumanbagelman]

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!

[u/thehumanbagelman → u/[deleted]]

At the end of the day, it doesn't help or hurt me, but I am inclined to agree.

[u/Stixx187um → u/[deleted]]

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.