The Vibes Got Louder
Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash
Back in September, I wrote Why Vibe Coding Fails https://medium.com/@tsecretdeveloper/why-vibe-coding-fails-21606d29906e. At the time, vibe coding felt like a phase that would pass.
I thought this was going to be a slightly embarrassing moment in tech history where we all pretended that if code felt right, it probably was right and didn’t need any further investigation.
Reader, I was wrong.
Vibes didn’t fade. They didn’t quietly get replaced by something more sensible.
And here we are, 2026. Vibe away.
Because the vibes got louder.
From tool to doctrine
Last year, vibe coding was something developers experimented with. Front end developers became backend developers (and vice-versa), people changed a String here or there and we all went on with our lives.
Fast-forward to 2026, it’s become something you’re expected to do.
AI is no longer framed as a tool that can help us complete our work. It’s all changed now into a value signal. You need to signal that you’re using Ai and are part of the future rather than part of the past.
When I say my current company collects data about each and every developer’s AI usage I wonder if you’ll believe me. It’s like that so our VPs can announce “We’re really embracing AI here”, and for all I know it’s positively impacting the share price.
In the end nobody cares about the output of our vibes. No-one is investigating the edge cases. The quality of the work in production is an aspiration rather than a requirement.
All anyone cares about is whether AI is involved. Somewhere. Somehow. Preferably in a way that can be screenshotted, proven or written about in your performance review.
The confidence gap
So here’s the problem. Vibe coding didn’t remove uncertainty, but it masked it without true accountability.
Traditional, human written bad code is awkward. It’s defensive. It stinks of panic and Stack Overflow. Bad code written with AI looks calm. Confident. Well-formatted. It explains itself. It even apologizes politely in comments.
And that’s the dangerous part.
Because now when something breaks, the failure feels surprising rather than inevitable. The code looked right. The vibes were immaculate. Surely production wouldn’t betray us like this?
Production always betrays you.
Edge cases are still undefeated
No amount of vibes will stop users from:
• Clicking buttons in the wrong order
• Uploading files that are technically valid but spiritually cursed
• Treating every system as an adversarial puzzle
Real software lives in edge cases. That hasn’t changed. The only difference is that now we reach those edge cases faster and with more confidence.
We didn’t eliminate bugs.
We just shortened the distance between idea and incident.
AI theater is exhausting
What I didn’t fully appreciate in September is how performative this would become.
AI usage is now something you demonstrate upwards, not something you quietly use to get work done. It’s mentioned in pull requests. Highlighted in retros. Celebrated when a senior person solves a trivial problem with it.
Meanwhile, the actual hard work is in defining requirement. User behavior needs to be clarified, and flows mapped out the old-fashioned way. That is, by and for humans.
Tired, under-informed humans. But humans all the same,
The vibes are automated.
The thinking is still manual.
What the vibes are actually telling us
Vibe coding does reveal something important, though.
It shows us what people wish programming was like.
They wish it were forgiving, and ambiguity didn’t matter.
Unfortunately, software is a discipline where intent without precision is just a future bug report and that heart of software engineering is going nowhere.
The skill was never typing code. The skill is deciding what the system must do when reality refuses to cooperate. No vibe-based interface has solved that yet.
Conclusion
Vibe coding didn’t fail because the tools are bad. It failed because the problem was misdiagnosed.
Programming isn’t hard because we haven’t found the right way to ask for software. It’s hard because the world is inconsistent, users are unpredictable, and business rules are usually discovered mid-incident.
The vibes got louder.
Reality didn’t get quieter.
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper.
The Secret Developer is not vibing.