Does Vibe Coding Actually Boost Productivity?

Saturday Afternoon, "Just Make It Feel Like This"

Vibe Coding started gaining traction around early 2025. The idea is to give AI a general direction and mood instead of detailed specs, and let it handle the implementation. Say "build me a clean dashboard like Notion" and it just appears.

Cool concept. I spent 3 weeks testing whether it actually works on a side project.

Week 1: Wait, Is This Cheating?

The first week was genuinely impressive. I decided to build a personal reading tracker app. "Card grid of books, click to open detail, add a reading progress chart" -- a working skeleton came out in 30 minutes. Work that would have previously taken half a day just for component structure, type definitions, and styling. Over the week, I built 6 pages this way.

Productivity felt like it was 3-4x what I'd normally get. (This was the happiest week.)

Week 2: Something's Always a Little Off

The problem is the constant state of "it looks almost done but something's off" that never ends. The card layout AI generated breaks subtly at certain screen sizes. Chart colors are invisible in dark mode. Scroll position doesn't restore after page navigation.

Fixing these small issues one by one actually took longer than the initial build. "Fix this part" and it fixes one thing while breaking another. Fix that, and something else breaks. It never ends.

The first 80% of Vibe Coding comes fast. The remaining 20% eats up 80% of the total time.

Week 3: I Didn't Write This, So I Don't Understand It

This is where the biggest problem surfaced. Over two weeks, AI had generated about 3,000 lines of code. When bugs appeared, I had no idea where to look. I didn't write it. State management logic was scattered everywhere, and understanding the internals of AI-generated custom hooks required reading line by line.

I ended up asking AI to "explain this code to me." AI-written code, explained by AI, to me. It was a little funny.

So When Does It Actually Help?

For prototypes and hackathons where speed matters more than polish, Vibe Coding is genuinely great. You can crank out an MVP in a day. But for production, it's risky. The cost of fixing details, maintenance overhead, and the "I don't understand my own codebase" risk quickly erode the initial speed gains.

I Ended Up Going Half and Half

Here's what I settled on: I write the architecture and core logic myself, then hand off repetitive UI code and boilerplate to AI via vibe. I build the skeleton, AI puts the flesh on. This way I understand the code structure so debugging is possible, and repetitive work gets handled fast so I still get the speed benefits.

Vibe Coding is a tool, not a methodology. The point isn't "let AI do everything" but "be smart about what you delegate." I needed 3 weeks to figure that out. Wish I'd realized it sooner -- would have saved me the pain of week 2.