Everyone Hates Vibe Coders. They Shouldn’t.

I don't think you should throw vibe coders and AI agents in the same bag although I understand what you're saying. You can turn a vibe coder into a decent dev if they're receptive to criticism and learn from their mistakes (even if slowly). That's an essential soft skill in any team of engineers. Meanwhile, you can't prompt away the poor dataset that was used to train the underlying model of the AI agent. But regardless, what I am saying is that vibe coders have always been bad devs, AI just highlighted the extent of their current incompetence. I think architecture and standards are something you only learn with experience, even if you've studied it. Devs that code mindfully end up developing a sense of what's good design and what's bad design, either by themselves or by learning from more experienced peers, whether they use AI to help them code or not. If you have developed a sense of good architectural principles, then you can absolutely use AI to help you code, because you'll also know how to specify to the AI what form of output is useful for you. You can't do good prompt engineering without subject matter expertise. So, bottom line is that I agree that you need experience in the equation. But if a vibe coder makes a PR where it's clear they fed the entire file/script/source code to AI, that's not even vibe coding, that's the SWE equivalent of copy-pasting the wikipedia page about the civil war onto your history assignment. I'm not trying to defend vibe coding as a practice, I'm saying it's a sign that the dev needs further mentoring, and the inexcusability of their mistakes comes down to how much they're using AI to abstract away SWE principles.