4 posts tagged with "coding"

A post by Günter Richter got me thinking: everyone's rushing to vibe code, but almost nobody talks about the skills that decide whether you succeed or just generate an expensive mess. He's right that the tools don't replace fundamentals — they raise the stakes on them. So here's my own version: the three skills I'd want anyone to have before they let an AI write their software.

The "which AI coding agent is best" debate never really ends, and honestly it shouldn't — the answer depends far too much on how you work. I've spent time with all three of the big ones lately: Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and Google's Gemini Code Assist. Rather than pretend one wins outright, here's how I actually think about the trade-offs.

Every week there's a new tool promising to turn a sentence into a working app. I've lost count. The problem with most "best vibe coding tools" lists is that they rank everything against each other as if they're the same product — they're not. A tool built for a non-technical founder shipping an MVP is solving a completely different problem than one built for an engineer refactoring a 50k-line codebase.

So instead of a leaderboard, here's how I'd actually choose, grouped by what you're trying to do.

I rolled my eyes the first time I heard the phrase "vibe coding." It sounded like something invented to sell a course. Then I actually spent a few weekends doing it — describing what I wanted in plain English, letting an LLM write the code, running it, fixing what broke — and I had to admit the eye-roll was premature. There's something real here. There's also a trap, and most of the hype skips right over it.

So here's my honest take, from someone who ships backend and blockchain code for a living.