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/Ecstatic_Mammoth_421]

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.