I've been putting off writing about this because I wanted to actually use the stuff for more than a weekend before I said anything, but it's been about three weeks now and I think I've got opinions worth sharing.
Everyone and their cousin has been throwing around the phrase "vibe coding" since Andrej Karpathy's tweet back in February, and at first I rolled my eyes at it the way I roll my eyes at most tech Twitter coinages. But it stuck, and now it's basically shorthand for a specific thing: you sit in a terminal or an editor, you describe what you want in plain English, and an AI model writes the actual code while you mostly steer. I resisted this for a while because I'm the kind of person who still writes his own regex, but curiosity won.
What I've actually been running
I've had Claude Code's CLI research preview open in one terminal tab and Cursor open in another for most evenings this month, bouncing between the two depending on the task. Cursor's the friendlier one if you want something that feels like VS Code with a brain grafted on — you get inline suggestions, a chat pane, the whole thing. It's $20 a month for Pro and honestly worth it if you're doing this daily. Claude Code is rougher around the edges in a way I actually like; it lives in the terminal, it can read your whole repo, run your tests, and commit changes if you let it, and there's something satisfying about watching it work through a problem step by step in plain text instead of hiding the reasoning behind a slick UI.
The thing nobody tells you upfront is how much of "vibe coding" is actually just supervising. I gave Claude Code a fairly simple task last week (rename a batch of image files from a camping trip folder and update the alt text references scattered across three old blog posts on this very site) and it did fine, but only because I was watching every diff before it touched anything. Left unsupervised for even five minutes it renamed one file in a way that broke a link on a 2013 post about, of all things, a Raspberry Pi B+ review. Small thing. Would've been annoying to find later.
My actual complaint
My specific gripe, and I mean this as a real complaint and not just contrarian throat-clearing: these tools are extremely confident about file paths that don't exist. Ask it to edit something and it'll sometimes just assert a file is at src/utils/helpers.js when the project doesn't even have a src folder, and it'll write a perfectly reasonable diff for a file that isn't there. You catch it eventually, but it costs you trust, and trust is the whole point of handing code-writing over to something else. I'd rather it say "I don't see that file, can you point me to it" every single time than guess wrong even once in ten.
What's actually worked for me
A few habits I've landed on if you're trying this yourself:
- Commit before you let an agent touch anything. Every time. Not because it'll wreck your code (usually it won't) but because reviewing a diff is a hundred times easier than reviewing a mystery.
- Keep your asks small. "Fix the pagination bug on the archive page" works. "Clean up the whole theme" does not, and you'll spend longer untangling what it did than you would've spent doing it yourself.
- Don't trust it near anything touching money, auth, or deletion without reading every line twice. This should be obvious but I've seen people not do it.
I don't think this replaces knowing how to code, and I get a little tired of people online implying it does. What it's actually good for, in my experience, is the boring 20% — the boilerplate, the repetitive refactors, the "write me a script that does X" tasks I'd otherwise put off for a month. That's not nothing. It's just not the revolution some of the GTC-week hype this week made it sound like either. I was half-watching the Nvidia keynote stream Tuesday while doing dishes and it was a lot of very large numbers about very large data centers, which is its own kind of interesting but has approximately zero bearing on whether my little terminal assistant can find the right file.
Anyway. If you've been curious and putting it off the way I was, this is your nudge. Start small, commit often, and don't believe it when it tells you a file exists that you've never seen before.