Vibe Coding, Vibe Doctoring, Vibe Teaching, Vibe Parenting...

Easier tools don’t create experts. They expose who isn’t one.

“Vibe coding” is the latest fad. Programming is dead, they tell us. All those people creating software will have to find other jobs because it’s all so easy now.

Let’s slow down.

There have always been two parts to coding, at least for decades: deciding how a program should work and actually creating it. LLMs are fantastic at the second part. They stink at the first.

Coding, the act of typing syntax, wiring APIs, handling edge cases in loops, has never been the magical part of programming. It’s robotic, mechanical, almost industrial. There’s no surprise that a robot can do it well, and often faster and more consistently. The real sorcery has always been upstream: deciding what to build, why it matters, how the pieces should fit together conceptually, when to break convention for a better outcome, and, crucially, when the elegant solution on paper will become a nightmare in production. That domain remains stubbornly human.

As I’ve outlined in prior pieces, LLMs just aren’t very good at reasoning. That doesn’t mean people won’t defer to them, a phenomenon we call cognitive surrender, but like Catherine the Great floating down the Dnieper admiring Potemkin’s entirely fake villages, they’re awed by the spectacle without questioning what’s behind it.

But this piece isn’t really about vibe coding.

Vibe Teaching

LLMs are infinitely more patient than any teacher or professor. Some studies suggest they’re better at conveying information. They’re much cheaper. We’ve even heard about people spending hours teaching others how to “prompt” an LLM, an exercise that costs about $20 per month for anyone to access on their own (hint: just ask the LLM).

But teaching isn’t information delivery. Teaching is watching a student’s face when they hit a wall. It’s knowing when to push and when to back off. It’s the professor who pulls you aside after class and says “you’re better than this paper.” An LLM will patiently explain long division forever. It will never notice that a student hasn’t eaten breakfast or that their parents are getting divorced.

Vibe Parenting

Just feed in your kid’s age, weight, schedule, and preferences, then follow the LLM’s instructions about what to do. You become the robot, at least until real robots are produced.

The absurdity is obvious here, which should make you wonder why it isn’t equally obvious with coding.

Vibe Lawyering

This one seems to be gaining traction. LLMs are fantastic at pretending to be $1,200 per hour white-shoe lawyers. They write beautiful briefs. They cite relevant precedent (sometimes real, sometimes hallucinated, but always confident).

Except the real purpose of most lawyers isn’t legal scholarship. It’s preventing conflict or working through it. Most people don’t need a brilliant appellate litigator. They need the rumpled-suit, Maalox-drinking-from-the-bottle kind of attorney who calls the person who calls the ex’s lawyer and says “how do we move forward?”

Try getting an LLM to do that.

Vibe Doctoring

I won’t dwell on this one long because it’s personal. I have MS. Usually it’s under control. Usually. But when it first reared its ugly head, it looked like a stroke, and that’s what the doctors treated it as. After a battery of tests, they figured out what was actually happening. Scary but not fatal.

Now reverse that. Imagine a person plugs their symptoms into an LLM, gets told it’s probably an MS flare, and heads home to rest instead of going to the emergency room. And it was actually a stroke. A fatal or severely debilitating stroke.

The LLM was confident in both scenarios. That’s the problem.

Vibe Legislating

OK, this one might actually work, in the sense that the LLMs would probably get something done. What that something would be might not be exactly palatable, but it would at least make sense to a robot. Which, given the current state of Congress, could be a real improvement.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Averages

Studies that say LLMs can outperform humans tend to say they perform a little better than average. Average is the definition of a C in school, a grade most people aren’t going to crow about.

Professionals aren’t average. That’s the whole point of being a professional. A surgeon who performs “a little better than average” isn’t someone you want operating on you. You want the one who’s done this specific procedure a thousand times and knows what to do when something goes wrong that isn’t in any textbook.

Businesses laying off front line workers are pleased with the cost savings .. until the complaints and the cancellations come in. Get rid of talented techies only to find them popping up with a competitive product or for a competitor. Replace a system with a vibe coded one by an amateur (“I can prompt ChatGPT!”) only to watch your customers flee and your brand value reduced to $20/mo.

What LLMs Are Actually Good For

We love LLMs. We use them extensively. We built VSTRAT, a platform that leans heavily on LLMs as structure. But the key word is structure. The frameworks and methodologies that channel the AI are what make it useful. And it’s still up to people to work through where that structure leads.

A senior developer using an LLM to code is a professional using a power tool. A non-developer using an LLM to “vibe code” is a person with a nail gun and no blueprints. One of them builds a house. The other stars in a horror film.

Look, despite decades of kitchen gadgets, meal kits, cooking shows, and now AI-generated recipes, people still go to restaurants. More than ever, actually. The tools to cook at home have never been better or cheaper. Yet somehow restaurants aren’t closing. Because the value was never just the food. It was the judgment, the experience, the craft, the human who knows when to break the recipe.

The same will be true of coding and every other profession the “vibe” crowd claims to have disrupted. Some people will tinker at home until they realize the true cost of maintaining what they’ve built. The rest will call a professional.

Meanwhile, the loudest voices proclaiming the end of professional work tend to be LLM company executives working hard to secure investment dollars for their money-losing businesses. The FUD is irresponsible and it’s hurting real professionals. When the people telling you the revolution is here are the ones selling the revolution, apply some of that stubbornly human intuition.

Intuition

Intuition is uniquely human and a human gift. Cherish it. It’s not the most efficient. It can be entirely irrational. And at its best, it’s beautiful.

We love our robotic friends. But LLMs are not going to substitute for people in any meaningful way, no matter what the cheerleaders say. They are spectacular assistants. They are terrible replacements.

The person who vibes their way through coding will produce something that looks right until it breaks. The person who vibes their way through medicine will be fine until they’re not. And the person who vibes their way through parenting was never really parenting at all.

Professionals guide LLMs. LLMs help professionals. Get the direction of that relationship wrong and the consequences aren’t theoretical. They’re real, and they’re coming.