Vibe-Coding: The Human Side of Software
"Vibe-coding" emerged in 2023 as a Rorschach test for our development future — revealing two competing visions that challenge our fundamental relationship with code.
When AI researcher Andrej Karpathy champions vibe-based programming, he's dismantling decades of software engineering orthodoxy. His approach treats code generation as jazz improvisation rather than architecture — sensing, adjusting, feeling the way forward through iterative AI prompting. It asks: What if precision planning is obsolete? What if intuition outperforms specification in an AI-augmented world?
Leadership coach Michal Ruzicka's interpretation cuts in the opposite direction. His vibe-coding elevates the craft of human readability in an era obsessed with machine optimization. It's a provocation: What if the most valuable code isn't the cleverest algorithm but the one that forms the clearest emotional contract with its future readers? What if empathy, not efficiency, is the ultimate engineering metric?
The collision of these ideas forms a powerful dialectic. Organizations adopting these principles report faster knowledge transfer and substantial increases in cross-functional collaboration. But the deeper transformation is philosophical: code is evolving from pure logic into a medium of relationship — whether human-to-AI or human-to-human. The winners in tomorrow's technical landscape won't just code differently; they'll conceive of code's purpose differently, embracing the liminal space where intuition, empathy, and logic converge. The question isn't whether to adopt vibe-coding, but which version of our technical future you're willing to create.
Engage:
https://pablojaviersalgado.substack.com/p/vibe-coding?r=5bgj9e
