davidbau.com Vibe Coding
December 22, 2025
Two Kinds of Vibe Coding
There are two categories of vibe coding. One is when you delegate little tasks to a coding LM while keeping yourself as the human “real programmer” fully informed and in control.
The second type of vibe coding is what I am interested in. It is when you use a coding agent to build towers of complexity that go beyond what you have time to understand in any detail. I am interested in what it means to cede cognitive control to an AI. My friend David Maymudes has been building some serious software that way, and he compares the second type of vibe coding to managing a big software team. Like the stories you’ve heard of whole startups being created completely out of one person vibe coding.
Source: davidbau.com Vibe Coding
The term “vibe coding” is often used disparagingly.
And debates or discussions about the practise feel very much centred on the capability of models today. Something which is changing incredibly rapidly. From personal experience having worked with these models for more than three years now, in terms of code generation, the improvements over that time are almost unimaginable.
There are many concerns about simply prompting a code generation model to produce an output and letting it run, not being overly concerned or if concerned at all about the quality of code and then using that output without checking it, particularly. Without understanding it and without even inspecting the code.
Here David Bau writes in praise of vibe coding, more or less in this sense, although he does suggest providing guard rails and comprehensive testing to ensure the quality of code.
