Opinion: Vibe Coding Without Coders... AKA Whack-a-Mole

AI-assisted “vibe coding” is powerful — you describe what you want, and the system spits out an app. For standard features, it’s magical. Need a login flow? A CRUD table? A dashboard with filters? Done in seconds.

But once you move past cookie-cutter apps, things get messy. Without real programming skills, vibe coding quickly turns into a game of whack-a-mole. Fix one behavior, and something else breaks. Try to refine a workflow, and suddenly your earlier “working” feature no longer works. Each prompt is a new swing of the mallet, but the moles keep popping up faster than you can hit them.

That’s the paradox: AI can accelerate the simple parts of development, but sophistication still requires systems thinking, debugging skills, and understanding trade-offs. Without that foundation, you don’t have control — you’re just reacting to whatever bug pops up next.

Vibe coding lowers the barrier to entry, but it doesn’t erase the reality that software engineering is as much about discipline and structure as it is about features. Until the tools get better, expect to keep playing whack-a-mole.