Vibe Coding Is Not AI-Assisted Development (And Conflating Them Is Hurting Us Both)

There's a term doing the rounds right now that makes me twitch every time I see it used interchangeably with something I actually care about: vibe coding . I'm not here to gatekeep. Language evolves, terms get stretched, and honestly, if vibe coding gets more people writing software, that's probably net positive for the world. But I am here to argue that conflating vibe coding with AI-assisted development is quietly doing damage — to how teams evaluate tooling, to how organisations set expectations, and to how we as engineers think about our own craft. These are not the same thing. They are not even on the same spectrum. What Vibe Coding Actually Is Karpathy coined the term earlier this year, and to his credit, he was honest about what it meant. You describe what you want, you accept what the model gives you, you don't particularly read it, and you move on. You're surfing a wave of plausible output. The vibe is the product. This is a genuinely interesting mode of working. For prototypi