The Basics of Vibe Engineering

What’s Happening

Okay so Building products without the coding part The post The Basics of Vibe Engineering appeared first on Towards Data Science.

I d a meme on LinkedIn a few days ago saying that a lot of the top engineers are now just using AI to code. It reached thousands and got quite a few heated opinions. (yes, really)

The space is clearly split on this, and the people against it mostly think of it as outsourcing an entire project to a system that can’t build reliable software.

The Details

I didn’t have time to respond to every comment, but I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about how you can use AI to build today. It may surprise you that a lot of it is still engineering, just on a different level than before.

So let’s walk through how this space has evolved, how to plan before using AI, why judgement and taste still matter, which AI coding tools are winning, and where the bottlenecks still are. Because software engineering might be changing, but it doesn’t seem to be disappearing.

Why This Matters

The space is moving fast Before we get into how to actually build with these tools, it’s worth understanding how fast things have changed. Cursor became the first real AI-assisted IDE breakout in 2024, even though it shipped in 2023, but getting it to produce something good without leaving behind a trail of errors was not easy. I struggled a lot even last summer using it.

The AI space continues to evolve at a wild pace, with developments like this becoming more common.

Key Takeaways

• The last few months have been different and weve seen this in socials too.
• Spotify publicly claimed its top developers haven’t written a single line of code manually since December.
• Anthropic’s own internal team reportedly has 80%+ of all deployed code written with AI assistance .

The Bottom Line

Anthropic also found that Claude Opus 4. 6 found out 22 novel vulnerabilities in Firefox in two weeks, 14 of them high-severity, roughly a fifth of Mozilla’s entire 2025 high-severity fix count.

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