I Vibe Coded a Site That Makes Fun of Vibe Coding

Vibe coding isn't coming for the software industry. It's already here, it has helped itself to the coffee, and it is reorganizing your repo.

Remember Stack Overflow? We used to copy twelve lines of someone else's answer, rename the variables and call it engineering. Those days are gone. Now an AI agent writes the whole feature from a prompt. It also writes the test cases. And the documentation. Developers have finally automated the one job they could never quite hand off: their own.

To the code-curious, this is a gold rush. Anyone with a chat window and a confident tone can ship. To the seasoned mavens, it is mildly infuriating. Imagine spending twenty years earning your scars, only to watch a newcomer with a prompt out-ship you on Tuesday, with a suspiciously beautiful commit graph to prove it.

Here's the uncomfortable part. You can't wave this off as "junior developer code." It isn't. The breadth of what these agents know is uncanny. I have watched them produce genuinely good code, often enough that I've stopped being surprised and started taking notes. I'll share plenty of those examples in the weeks to come.

But first, the fun part.

You might be a vibe coder if…

I wanted a tongue-in-cheek series of one-liners about vibe coding, in the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy's legendary "You might be a redneck if…". Naturally, I had AI build the site. Then I had it write the first batch of gotchas.

Which is a bit like Mr. Foxworthy hiring a redneck to ghostwrite his jokes about rednecks.

It reminds me of an old line about duality, usually credited to the humorist Robert Benchley:

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't.

So, to poke fun at vibe coding, I am vibe coding. It's a site about AI, built by AI, laughing at AI, reviewed by a human who has been writing software since 1991. Somewhere, Douglas Hofstadter is drawing a strange loop around this paragraph.

New gotchas land every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at vibecoder.itmusings.com. Read them, share the ones that hit a little too close to home, and if you see yourself in one… well, you might be a vibe coder.

Enjoy the series.