AI-assisted coding is genuinely faster. It’s also quietly shifting more responsibility onto review — here’s what that means for how teams should work.
“Vibe coding” — describing what you want in plain English and letting an AI write most of the code — has gone from a joke to an actual workflow for a lot of developers. It’s real, it’s fast, and it’s not a substitute for someone understanding what the code does before it ships.
What “vibe coding” actually means
The term describes leaning on an AI coding tool heavily enough that you’re steering by outcome — “make the login page match this design” — rather than writing most of the logic yourself line by line.
Used well, it’s an enormous accelerator for boilerplate, first drafts, and exploring an unfamiliar library.
Why it feels so fast
The speed is real: a task that used to mean an hour of reading documentation and writing repetitive code can now take minutes.
That speed creates a temptation to skip the part where you actually understand what got generated, because everything appears to work on the first try.
Where it quietly breaks down
“It runs without errors” and “it’s correct” are very different bars. AI-generated code can pass a quick manual test while still mishandling edge cases, missing security checks, or silently using the wrong data type — the kind of issues that don’t show up until the code hits production traffic.
The faster the code arrives, the easier it is to skip the scrutiny that would have caught these.
What good review looks like now
The teams handling this well haven’t dropped code review — they’ve shifted what it focuses on. Less time is spent debating formatting and style, since tools handle that automatically now.
More time goes to the questions a generator can’t reliably answer for itself: does this match how the rest of the codebase actually works, what happens on unexpected input, and does the person who “wrote” this — human or AI — actually understand why it works.