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Last year, I released five different apps on the App Store. Four of them were vibe coded, meaning I wrote very little code myself and let AI generate most of the implementation.
The apps look good. They work. They even make a small amount of revenue.
But if you ask me detailed questions about the codebase, I honestly would not be able to answer them confidently. The main reason is simple. I did not write most of the code. I only verified that the final result behaved the way I expected.
For small micro apps, this honestly feels fine. My apps do one thing, do it reasonably well, and stay relatively simple.
But what happens when this approach scales to large applications?
Every single day I hear the same thing from developers:
“We have not written a single line of code in months.” “Coding is dead.” “No one writes code anymore.”
Some developers even take pride in saying they no longer review the generated code. And honestly, I understand why. How do you realistically review thousands of lines of AI generated code every single day?
That is the part that scares me.
We are slowly moving toward a world where developers no longer truly understand their own codebases. In many cases, they do not even understand the domain they are building for. Requirements go into an AI tool on one side, and a working application comes out on the other.
Everything becomes optimized for speed.
But nobody is thinking deeply about what happens six months later when the system becomes harder to maintain, harder to debug, and harder to trust.
And where does responsibility fit into all of this?
Are developers still willing to stand behind the code that ships to production? Are we sure that feature actually needed 10,000 lines of generated code? Maybe the same thing could have been implemented with one tenth of the code and much better clarity.
Programming is not like learning how to ride a bike. It is not a skill you learn once and keep forever. Programming requires constant practice. If you stop thinking deeply about architecture, debugging, problem solving, and code design, those skills slowly fade away.
And no, this is not an anti AI post.
I use AI every single day. It has become part of my workflow. But I still use it like an instructor, not like a replacement for thinking. I want to understand what is happening underneath the surface.
AI can absolutely make us faster.
But faster without understanding is a dangerous combination.
We are definitely living in strange times.