vibe coder, leveling up

"vibe coder" gets thrown around like an insult. i'll take it — but i want to be honest about what it actually means for me.

it started lazy. let the model write it, run it, if it works ship it, if it breaks paste the error back. i didn't read the code. i didn't understand the code. i just vibed.

somewhere in the last while it flipped. now i read every diff. i argue with the model about architecture. i catch the bad patterns before they land. i can tell when it's confidently wrong. the ai still writes most of the lines — but i own all of them now. i know why each one is there.

that's the part people miss. vibe coding isn't the destination, it's the on-ramp. you start by trusting the machine completely because you have to, then you slowly earn the right not to. the goal was never to stay a vibe coder. it was to become an engineer who happens to move at vibe-coder speed.

long way to go. but i can read the code now. that's not nothing.