Vibe Coding: When Intuition Helps Me Build and When It Gets in My Way

When I first started hearing the term “vibe coding,” it immediately resonated with me because I realized I’d already been doing it—long before it had a name.

Vibe coding, at least as I’ve experienced it, is when I build by feel. I start with an idea or a direction rather than a plan. I prompt an AI, tweak things until they work, and move forward based on momentum. I’m not thinking about long-term structure or scalability yet. I’m thinking about whether something feels promising.

At first, that approach felt incredibly freeing.

As someone coming from a design background, coding used to feel intimidating. Vibe coding lowered that barrier. It let me experiment without needing to understand everything upfront. I could see results quickly, which made the process feel less abstract and more human. That immediacy helped me stay curious instead of getting stuck in fear.

In the early stages of a project, vibe coding genuinely helped me move. Instead of overthinking architecture or correctness, I could explore ideas, test interactions, and figure out whether something was even worth building. Psychologically, it replaced perfectionism with play. I wasn’t trying to be right. I was trying to learn.

But over time, I started noticing the downside.

When vibe coding stayed in my process for too long, my projects became fragile. Things worked, but I didn’t always know why. When something broke, I felt stuck. I realized that I had traded short-term speed for long-term clarity. The code looked fine on the surface, but underneath it was full of assumptions I hadn’t fully examined.

That’s when vibe coding stopped feeling empowering and started feeling stressful.

I also noticed how easy it was to confuse output with understanding. With AI generating suggestions so quickly, I could produce something functional without developing the mental models needed to reason about it. That created a gap between what I had built and what I actually understood. The gap didn’t show up right away, but when it did, it was painful.

I saw a parallel between vibe coding and overdesign in student work. In both cases, intuition is doing a lot of the heavy lifting early on. And in both cases, intuition works best as a starting point, not a substitute for structure. When I relied on vibe coding too heavily, I wasn’t avoiding effort. I was avoiding the discomfort of slowing down and making things legible.

What I’ve learned is that vibe coding works best when I treat it as a phase, not a philosophy.

I use it now to explore, not to finalize. I let myself move fast at the beginning, but I make a conscious shift when the project starts to matter. That’s the moment where I stop asking whether something feels right and start asking whether I understand it. I rewrite things. I name decisions. I clean up assumptions. I turn intuition into intention.

That transition has become one of the most important parts of my process.

I don’t think vibe coding is a problem. I think unexamined vibe coding is. When I use it deliberately, it helps me build confidence, momentum, and curiosity. When I use it to avoid understanding, it quietly sets me up to fail later.

AI has made vibe coding easier than ever, and that makes this distinction even more important. The tools aren’t the issue. The question is whether I’m using them to think better or to think less.

For me, the real learning happens when I slow down after the vibe. When I ask myself why something works, not just whether it works. When I’m willing to replace speed with clarity.

Vibe coding has helped me start.
Structure helps me finish.

Success comes from knowing when to switch between the two.