I try to use Vibe Coding in Andrej Karpathy’s original sense:

There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.

Which makes it hard to describe what I do, which is not that. I have been calling it AI-Assisted Programming, but that’s too long. Simon Willison proposed Vibe Engineering:

I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to how the code actually works. This leaves us with a terminology gap: what should we call the other end of the spectrum, where seasoned professionals accelerate their work with LLMs while staying proudly and confidently accountable for the software they produce?

I propose we call this vibe engineering, with my tongue only partially in my cheek.

He wrote this in October, but it only started to sink in with me recently when he wrote about JustHTML and how it was created. Read the author, Emil Stenström’s, account of how he wrote it with coding agents. This is not vibe coding. He is very much in the loop. I think his method will produce well-architected code with minimal tech debt. Like I said in my book: “The amount of tech debt the AI introduces into my project is up to me.” I think this is true for Emil too.

My personal workflow is to go commit by commit, because it’s the amount of code I can review. But, I see the benefit of Emil’s approach and will try it soon.