Hey everyone,
I wanted to open up a candid discussion about a reality many self-taught or non-traditional developers face: "vibe coding." We’ve all seen the trend—using AI to spin up code quickly based on a prompt or a "vibe" without necessarily having a formal computer science degree or deep, rigorous training in that specific stack.
If you identify as a vibe coder, or if you are working without a formal engineering background, I’d love to get your insights on a few specific challenges:
- How do you actually validate the code?
When you don't have years of formal training in software architecture, how do you ensure the code the AI spits out is safe, efficient, and actually doing what it's supposed to do? What is your personal validation process? Do you rely on manual clicking, writing automated tests with the AI, or just pushing to production and waiting for bug reports?
- How long does validation take you?
"Vibe coding" feels incredibly fast at first because the initial code generation takes seconds. However, if you are learning on the fly, how long does the verification and debugging phase actually take you? Does the time spent fixing edge cases wipe out the speed gained from using AI in the first place?
- What do you do when everything completely fails?
We all hit that wall where the AI gets stuck in an hallucination loop, the code is a tangled mess of spaghetti, and nothing works. When a feature completely fails and you don't have the deep foundational training to debug it from scratch, what is your next step? Do you scrap the project, seek mentorship, or start a completely new prompt thread?
Let's talk about the real metrics, the struggles, and the best practices for validating AI-generated code when you're figuring it out as you go.
Drop your experiences below!
Best regards,
Momenul Ahmad
Vibe Coder & Tech Explorer