It’s 11 PM on a Tuesday in late 2025. I have a Data Structures assignment due tomorrow. The task? Implement a Red-Black Tree from scratch in C++.
My professor, bless their old-school heart, wants us to "feel the pain of pointer management."
My brain, fried from three lectures today, is screaming for an easier way. I open my IDE. I have GitHub Copilot Workspace open on one monitor, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on the other.
I type: "Yo, I need a Red-Black Tree implementation in C++. Keep the vibe academic, handle the edge cases for rotation, and add comments that sound like a stressed undergrad wrote them."
Thirty seconds later. Done. ✨
It compiles. It passes the test cases. It’s beautiful code. And I have absolutely no idea how it works.
This is "Vibe Coding." It’s the dominant strategy for half my cohort, and honestly? I think it might be ruining my education.
The Sugar Rush of Speed 🍭
"Vibe Coding" is the evolution of prompt engineering. We aren't writing detailed specs anymore. We're just describing the intent—the vibe—and letting the models handle the boilerplate, the syntax, and the logic.
It feels incredible. It’s intoxicating. What used to take me a weekend of agonizing over Stack Overflow threads now takes an hour of casual conversation with an LLM. I’m shipping side projects faster than ever. My GitHub contribution graph looks insane.
I feel productive. I feel like a 10x developer.
But then I sit in my Operating Systems lecture, and the professor asks a question about memory paging or race conditions, and my mind goes blank. The AI never mentioned that. The AI just made the "Segmentation Fault" go away so I could go back to scrolling TikTok.
Imposter Syndrome 2.0
🎭
Every CS student has imposter syndrome. But in 2025, it’s different. It’s not just "I’m not smart enough." It’s "I’m a fraud who is just really good at gluing together AI outputs."
The terrifying realization hit me during a mock technical interview last month. I wasn't allowed to use Copilot. I had to reverse a linked list on a whiteboard.
I froze.
I knew what a linked list was. I knew why you’d reverse it. But the actual muscle memory of moving the pointers? The algorithm? It was gone. Atrophied because I’d outsourced that kind of "low-level thinking" to the machines for the last two years.
It felt like I was a carpenter who only knew how to order pre-built cabinets from IKEA, suddenly asked to build one from raw lumber.
The CS Degree vs. The Real World
This creates a massive conflict in university right now.
The Academia Vibe: "You must understand the fundamentals! Build it in C! Understand the Big O notation!"
The Industry Vibe (in 2025): "Ship it yesterday. Use whatever tools make you fastest. If you aren't using AI, you're already behind."
If I keep Vibe Coding my way through this degree, am I going to be useless when the AI hits a wall it can't climb?
Finding the Balance: From "Do It" to "Teach Me"
I’m not going to stop using AI. That would be professional suicide in 2025. Pandora’s box is open.
But I am changing how I use it. I’m trying to move from passive consumption to active interrogation.
If I Vibe Code a solution, I force myself to do what I call a "Reverse Vibe Check":
Don't just copy-paste: I type out the AI-generated code myself. It sounds stupid, but it forces my brain to process the syntax.
The "Explain Like I'm 5" Prompt: Once the code works, I open a fresh chat and paste it back in: "Explain this code to me like I’m a first-year CS student who hates math. Focus on the 'why', not just the 'what'."
Break it on purpose: I ask the AI, "What are three ways this implementation could fail in a high-load production environment?" This teaches me the edge cases the happy-path "vibe" missed.
The Verdict?
Vibe Coding isn't ruining my degree. My reliance on it to skip the hard parts is ruining my degree.
AI is the best tutor ever invented, but it's also the world's easiest enabler of laziness. The challenge for us juniors in late 2025 isn't learning to prompt better; it's having the discipline to close the chat window and stare at the broken code until we understand why it’s broken.
Are you Team Vibe😎🍹 or Team Grind? 😢🧠
Top comments (59)
"Team vibe" is straight way to unemployment.
In a few years it is not you who will be vibe coding. Your Product Owner / Product Designer will. They can use keyboard too to write prompt with feature request. You will be an obsolete layer in this process.
The demand for developers will be reduced to hardcore stuff. Backbone systems, mainframes, very complex backends, device drivers, bare metal code, etc. You will be paid to understand complex problems.
This is assuming the current model is sustainable. With the AI bubble continuing to grow yet nobody finding a way to make money from it, while the internet is getting saturated with already AI generated content and the people generating the quality training data are getting fed up with their work being stolen and starting to take measures against it, I wouldn't be too surprised if AI crashed really hard in the coming years and only made a full comeback after many years of hardware breakthroughs make it financially viable again.
It is sustainable. Or to be more precise - it reached a level which makes it reasonably priced tool for software development.
AI bubble will crash hard. All AI FOMO and AI Slop projects will be evaluated by the market, which is natural healing process of oversaturated economy. But AI development tools will survive this crash for three reasons:
This faces the same feedback problem as most other AI training: Real people start moving their code out of reach from AI tools and more and more of what remains is itself AI-generated. Eventually the quality just degrades.
And in the process make mistakes more likely.
Compilers don't catch difficult mistakes. If your standard for good AI code is that it compiles, then yea, compilers make that easy; but for one they aren't "instant", specially on bigger projects, and more importantly, they don't help much with the real problem of AI code.
But all of that aside, my point still stands. AI doesn't pay for itself; it's not financially sustainable. And that's likely going to get worse as the massive resource consumption brings AI into conflict with local populations around server farms.
The bubble will burst eventually, AI will "die" for a while, and eventually, technology will have caught up to its requirements and companies will start to scale up its usage again, probably with much less hype surrounding it.
You’re absolutely right
Vibe coding assignments is like copying your friends homework, but your friend is the tip of your fingers where you can just ask for the answer. I don't blame students for going down this route at all. When the stress and pressure builds up, it's hard not to make these choices in fear of failing out.
Problem is, now every student will blend together with all the cheating. So it really comes down to your side projects to differentiate you from the rest. Having said all that, if you don't play the same game everyone else is playing, then you fall behind too focused on these academic assignments when everyone else is focusing on side projects, networking, and working on their career instead of assignments.
So this quote is actually true for students too.
And actually, when you get to the real world, the quote is inaccurate. It should actually be
Companies don't want juniors using AI, in fact it's a red flag cuz they won't learn proper fundamentals to grow. In fact, do most companies even want juniors anymore? Tough times for CS students.
You asked one question right "do most companies even want juniors anymore?" That's why colleges are introducing AI in curriculums. Will they replace seniors, may be yes in some cases.
Companies also don't want to use AI beyond a level where their proprietary and intellectual property is at risk.
AI fails to provide privacy and security as it can't preform great when deployed standalone, only cloud models perform better and companies don't trust them. AI also failed at critical thinking and wide adoption even with local models in place. AI can build apps but not well performing and secure apps, AI works best only with humans in the loop.
AI is also being used by hackers to create sophisticated cyber attacks.
There are always two sides to the coin. AI spending is the main reason for layoffs. Not less need for tech people.
You’ve worded everything right, I do think eventually, when AI isn’t reliable anymore, it would differentiate between people who actually “know” what they are doing and those who relied solely on AI. I do see AI to be an advanced search engine that helps you, but to rely solely on it will be a dangerous ball game all together.
I think thats a reasonable take, it's a bit of both, we're still figuring out where Vibe coding sits as a technique.
I studied C++ in my degree, but I have always worked in higher level languages - Java / C# / Node etc. I am glad I have had the experience on a lower level language, it helps me appreciate when higher level languages reach their limit how to fiddle with their internals to get what i need to run.
I see vibe coding in a similar manner, over time I'd expect the industry switches to a mode where a majority of engineers do not spend a lot of time writing code by hand, but they know how to do it for the 10% of times when a fine tuned dedicated amount of concentration is required.
This is a great take. It’s not about replacing coding, it’s about shifting where we spend our energy. Having that 'low-level' understanding is definitely the safety net for when the 'vibe' doesn't match the requirements.
Honestly, I started way before the whole AI/vibe coding thing. My college syllabus was stuck in the past, so I basically had to scrap everything I learned and start over on my own. It was a grind to bridge that gap to modern dev work, but that struggle is actually what got me hooked. There’s something about finally getting real engineering right that just clicked for me.
I learned programming with Pascal, and while it definitely wasn't all applicable to modern development work, the parallels are still there.
IT is just too fast-moving to even attempt to teach people everything they are going to need on the job, so it's more about teaching the mindset that can then be applied to whatever the field is currently up to.
I feel that 100%. The gap between the college syllabus and actual production work is massive. It feels like you have to learn two curriculums: one for the grades and one for the actual job. Respect for the grind that 'click' moment is definitely what keeps us all going.
Unpopular opinion nobody asked here...
For beginners my take is radical: don't use AI to generate code.
Use it as your teaching assistant (to quiz you, generate test cases, explain a tricky code block). Otherwise you'd be like sending someone else to the gym and then complaining when you don't see your muscles growing.
Never said somebody asked… I think people need to understand that blogs are there for free speech. You don’t need to be rude and say nobody asked, if you don’t like the post, you can just ignore it and scroll I guess
Maame, I enjoyed your post. You raised a really good point. I started my comment with "unpopular opinion" because unlike most opinions I think we shouldn't use AI until we're comfortable coding on our own. Sorry if my comment landed on a different tone. Again, great post.
I guess i misunderstood then, thank you
It’s beautiful code. And I have absolutely no idea how it works.This is the biggest problem ppl have. Using AI to scaffold the code is perfectly fine. It speeds things up. But then you need to reverse-engineer the result and take the time to understand it. If you have questions or doubts, let AI explain. Demand sources for the suspicious claims. This is how I am trying to move forward.
Where there times when you reverse vibe checked that you found out the AI was wrong explaining things?
Yes, constantly. That’s the whole problem with vibe coding—you can't just trust the vibe; you have to verify the syntax. If you don't understand the code, you won't know it's broken until it crashes.
I would hate to be in college today interested in computers. I began learning about the Intel 4004 and 8008 in the late 60's. I took my first programming class in 1972 as a sophomore in HS. I learned BASIC, and the next semester was FORTRAN. Now, 50 years later I'm semi-retired, having spent my career as a software architect, designer, and developer.
Honestly, I think computer science is dead. EVERYTHING that the entire CS curriculum was based around is dealing with LIMITATIONS: limitations in RAM, CPU speed, external storage, and how much time it takes to move data in and out of the computer.
EVERYTHING they teach today is IRRELEVANT! For all practical purposes, software platforms are virtually LIMITLESS! A Raspberry Pi 4 has more power, RAM, and storage than a PC had in 2000! And the WiFI on it is faster than the fastest LANs we had in 2000. Today's cheapest cell phones have more computing power than Cray computers ever did.
Before long, coding will be done by AI "under the hood" and nobody will see it. That will be a Good Thing, because it will result in more consistent code structures, application of design patterns, and all of the "plumbing code" will be managed automatically. (Try adding a field to a form, then the DB, then ferret out how many places pass a copy of each record around in the system, either as a naked data structure or as a class that encapsulates the fields and adds some business logic to the classes methods. This is something AI eats for snacks, but it takes humans days if not weeks, and is extremely error-prone.)
But there are billions of lines of code that will need to be maintained for quite a while until IT managers have the guts to let AI do it. Until then, a CS degree will be good for one thing (for most CS grads): maintaining old code. And most of that skill will come from your ability to read and understand large ugly code bases that have been touched by a dozen or more people over the years, only some of whom followed the requisite coding standards the company has.
The term "vibe coding" was coined by a guy who was one of the co-founders of OpenAI and wrote a lot of the code. He's an extremely skilled and proficient developer. I think it's amusing that so many people have adopted his notions of "vibe coding" to their own work. They're delusional.
I hate to say this, but as a student, it's not "vibe coding" but "brain-washing".
He was remarking how intuitive it was to take the concepts ALREADY IN HIS HEAD and have them "just explained in code" by the AI. I totally get where he's coming from, because I'm constantly banging my head up against what he's comparing this experience to: the limitations of current programming tools and technologies. When you've been around a while, it becomes more like a jail cell and you keep banging into its walls.
You said exactly the opposite, and why you're worried: you have no frigging clue what's going on, there's no mental model of what you want, and yet with a few keystrokes can get AI to write you a bunch of code that you cannot even explain! That's NOT "vibe" anything. It's like watching an aircraft take off and feeling amazed that it can do that, with no understanding of the aerodynamics or physics behind it.
It's unlikely that kids in school today studying CS will EVER have the level of understanding that the guy who coined that term has, or even people who've been programming for 5+ years professionally. That's simply because AI is making the coding process obsolete.
And I, for one, cannot wait for it to totally disappear! I WANT to be able to take ideas in my head, describe what I'm seeing, and be able to see something close to what's in my head within 5 minutes or so. I've been programming for 40+ years and I cannot even dream of doing that in less than a week or more for even the simplest ideas! To me, programming is like watching grass grow. It's a painfully slow process that ONLY exists because of LIMITATIONS that computers and programming tools have had since they were invented.
AI is going to unleash the REAL power and possibilities of what computers can do. We ain't seen nuth'n yet ... and as programming disappears, we'll start to see an amazing explosion of things that have always been locked away in people's heads; they had no way to get them out because they weren't programmers and it would be cost-prohibitive to hire people who were.
AI is democratizing access to computer technology by anybody with an idea they want to get out of their head.
"Vibe coding" is an oxymoron -- for the guy who coined the term, he was reflecting on how easily it allowed him to express his thoughts.
But with no 'coding', and no understanding of programming, it's nothing. It's NOT reflecting your thoughts on PROGRAMMING because YOU DON'T HAVE ANY!
I don't say that to be mean, I say that to highlight the problem that AI is actually solving -- it will allow NON-PROGRAMMERS to get AI to build things in software they could never have imagined bringing to life any other way!
It's no longer "programming".
It's more like, "take this idea I have in my head and show me a virtual rendering of it on screen".
You can't get there by studying all of the historical limitations that gave rise to everything that CS teaches and is embodied in every aspect of programming to this day. None. Of. It. Applies. Today.
Today, the biggest limitations are these:
Nothing they teach in CS applies to any of these limits.
Study Political Science for the first two, and Cognitive Psych for the 3rd.
You’re totally right
You have perfectly put into words what I feel everyday as a final year student. I do this exact thing which you mentioned that tell LLMs to explain it to me. But still there is another layer of imposter syndrome which i feel. Even though i end up understanding what the task was, I ask myself, "Would I be able to recreate it from scratch?" And the answer is often no, and leaves me a bit defeated.....
I’m starting to realize that understanding the logic is the first hurdle, and syntax retrieval is a completely different muscle we’re still building. You aren't alone in this at all! We're basically learning to "read" the language fluently before we can "write" it, i guess 😊.
You are not very far from industry, most of engineers I have met recently, they are as good as their copilot is. If you start having arguments they say, “we have delivered what they have asked for in a set timeline “. When industry leaders mentioned their 30% code is written by AI, this means all the redundant code which was written by an engineer has been shifted to AI, but if you are solving real problems , that is still own for computer science engineers/scientists. AI can be assistant not novel thinker that’s my pinch of salt.
You’ve said it all
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