There is no Vibe Engineering

Summary

There is no Vibe EngineeringYou've probably heard about "vibe coding" by now. The term was recently coined by Andrej Karpathy in his tweet. Andrej defines Vibe Coding as "a new kind of coding, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists". The key difference between vibe coding and normal coding is that the engineer doesn’t interact with the codebase directly, and instead converses with the agent and inspects the final outcome. The term caught on and Twitter quickly flooded with posts about how AI has radically transformed coding and will soon replace all software engineers. While AI undeniably impacts the way we write code, it hasn't fundamentally changed our role as engineers. Allow me to explain. When the tornado comes whipping through your neighborhood and your house gets blown down and somehow you didn’t have insurance and you lose everything, you can’t control that. But you can certainly control how you’re gonna react to that situation.— Clancy Gilroy Coding vs Engineering Let’s start by clearly defining what a software engineer’s role entails, and to the surprise of some people, software engineering is not writing code. Yet even highly technical people often conflate coding and engineering. The most concise and precise definition of software engineering I've encountered is: Software engineering is programming integrated over time— Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time The integrated over time part is crucial. It highlights that software engineering isn't simply writing a functioning program but building a system that successfully serves the needs, can scale to the demand, and is able to evolve over its complete lifespan. However, similarly to normal coding, vibe coding only covers coding at a single point in time. If an agent is used to generate a quick prototype and validate it with tests, that’s coding – not engineering. Engineering means designing systems capable of wi...