Just to clarify, I google a lot while coding, but one thing I learnt from my engineering degree is that is there is no ‘best’ solution.
“Googling a lot while coding” is not even remotely close to vibe coding, please don’t gaslight yourself into that.
When you read up on things, you know what you’re looking for. You read a potential solution (e.g. part of a documentation, an example, someone else’s solution, a solution to a similar problem), you think about it and transfer that to your own problem, with your own code, with your own thoughts.
Using AI support is totally fine too - it’s a smarter code completion, nothing more. It might spit out something wrong, something partial, something good. You might ignore it as with the regular completion. In the end, it’s still you thinking about it, modifying it until it works, and doing your thing.
“Vibe coding” is basically saying tech jesus take the wheel. And it might go well for someone who cannot code, who managed to create their small game or some website. It will go horribly wrong for any project handling user data, sensitive data, or something that needs to be maintained after. We’ve had more than enough examples of that.
I saw that my Jetbrains All Product Pack subscription also includes their AI assistant and in Go it’s really able to write and refactor things in a useful manner. But I think a large part is that I’ve been programming for 30 years and I am able to tell the thing exactly what I want and can mention things I do not want and also spot issues. Right now I don’t see how they can manage a complete codebase, which I understand vibe coding to be. There are just so many things than can (subtly) go wrong and AI at the moment is not able to help with that. But they also keep getting better, so who knows where we’ll be in a year or two.
We will always have the same problem with computers doing what we tell them, but also not doing what we are not smart enough to tell them.