Vibe Coding Experience Week: From "Disenchantment" to Rational Understanding

Written by: Haotian

After experiencing a week of Vibe coding, I built an AI-powered RSS aggregation and reading site to replace the previous paid app that was not very user-friendly. It’s quite satisfying. However, during this process, I also gained a new perspective on Vibe Coding as a “disenchantment,” and I’d like to share:

1. Vibe Coding is essentially a productivity enhancement tool, a multiplication rather than an addition. For “super individuals” who already have product thinking, logical skills, and even some programming foundation, it can turn one person into a team, greatly expanding their capabilities.

But ultimately, it’s just an augmented skill, not a survival skill. Knowing Vibe Coding won’t turn an ordinary job into a high-paying position at a big company, and not knowing it doesn’t necessarily mean being left behind by the times.

2. Vibe Coding only lowers the barrier to entry but doesn’t increase the ceiling of ability. For example, in developing an RSS reader, the initial phase is very “wow,” with a single command producing a usable interface. But adding complex features later becomes troublesome.

For instance, detecting RSS source health, automatically deduplicating, or connecting to backend storage and optimizing structure will reveal a bunch of seemingly professional but obviously buggy issues. AI will jump between several seemingly complex but actually unsolvable solutions, burning through your tokens. In the end, you might find that experienced programmers can solve these with just a few lines of code and some environment setup.

3. The tool iteration of Vibe Coding is very fast. There’s no need to invest heavily in learning; initially, copying and pasting code for AI processing, and now IDEs embed AI directly into the interface. In the future, even front-end, back-end, and environment configuration might become foolproof.

If you learn to write precise prompts and some practical techniques at a certain stage, your skills might become obsolete after a major platform update.

4. Vibe Coding isn’t a savior for many people; it might even pose a crisis. After completing this RSS project, I started to dislike its reading experience—how often RSS sources update, what to do if they become invalid, how much of the original details to retain in AI summaries, how to sort content from multiple sources, and how to improve my reading experience. Turns out, these issues are almost unrelated to coding skills. They require a clearer understanding of product design and aesthetics.

There’s a saying: when code generation costs approach zero, the value of code itself also approaches zero. So, the real key to success lies in product taste and logical closed-loop ability. Truly valuable programmers in the future will be a combination of product managers, architects, and designers. The era of solely relying on coding to make a living may really be over.

5. Vibe Coding is a double-edged sword in the crypto field. The benefit is that native crypto enthusiasts’ learning ability and research motivation allow them to quickly master this skill, build data analysis platforms, analyze trades independently, and experiment with AI trading logic. But it also attracts many who don’t understand blockchain fundamentals, leading to a flood of surface-level, seemingly functional but actually risky code generated by AI.

That’s all.

Finally, I want to say that Vibe Coding is not revolutionary; it’s fundamentally a productivity tool. The same principle applies as with Excel macros, Photoshop actions, or Notion templates over the years: those who understand it can double their efficiency, and those who don’t aren’t significantly disadvantaged.

Don’t idolize it, and don’t panic about it. Stay curious and experiment moderately.