Simon Willison: Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)

Willison reminds us not to confuse vibe coding with professional software development.

This is James / linking

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/

Personal takeaways

• Don’t confuse vibe coding with software development.
• Software development: review, test and understand the code the LLM writes.
• Vibe coding: great for low stakes and personal projects.

• SW: golden rule for production-quality AI-assisted programming is that I won’t commit any code to my repository if I couldn’t explain exactly what it does to somebody else.
• If an LLM wrote the code for you, and you then reviewed it, tested it thoroughly and made sure you could explain how it works to someone else that’s not vibe coding, it’s software development.
• But vibe coding is great for low stakes projects.
• Claude Artifacts is great for vibe coding because it is sandboxed.