vi3ecoding Team
By Massimo Di Chiara, founder of Vi3ecoding — 11+ years in web, 100+ client projects shipped.
Ask ten people what vibe coding is and you'll get ten answers.
Half of them are wrong. The other half are too generic to be useful.
Vibe coding is the practice of shipping real software by directing AI tools instead of typing every line yourself. The keyword is "directing" — not "watching."
Related reading from vi3ecoding:
- Seven Mistakes New Vibe Coders Make
- Context Engineering: The Skill That Separates Good AI Builders From Great Ones
- The Lovable AI Builder Guide
I've been making a living from this for about two years. Long enough to have an opinion. Here's the honest founder's definition.
What vibe coding is not
Let's clear the noise first.
- It is not "the AI writes the code while you watch." That's a YouTube demo, not a workflow.
- It is not no-code with extra steps. Real code ships. You can read it, change it, deploy it.
- It is not prompt engineering. Prompts are a small part of the job. Context and judgment are the bigger parts.
- It is not a phase. The tools keep getting better, not worse.
- It is not "coding without thinking." If anything, it's more thinking, less typing.
If your mental model of vibe coding is any of these, you'll either over-trust the tools or dismiss them. Both are expensive mistakes.
Where the term came from
Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase in early 2025 to describe a kind of building where you "lean into the vibes" of what the AI produces and steer it toward something good. It caught on because it named a thing developers were already doing but didn't have a word for.
The word has since been twisted in two directions. Critics use it to mean sloppy AI output you didn't read. Marketers use it to mean any product built with an AI tool. Neither captures what it actually is in practice.
What vibe coding actually is
Three moves, in this order.
- Decide what to build. Real product work. Strategy, scope, trade-offs.
- Direct the AI to build it. With context, examples, and structured asks.
- Edit the output like a senior engineer would. Review the diff. Run the tests. Notice the smell.
A vibe coder is not someone who types less. A vibe coder is someone who thinks more — and pushes the typing to the tools.
The three jobs you actually do
When I describe vibe coding to founders, I use three roles.
- Strategist — what should exist, for whom, by when.
- Director — what the AI should build next, with what constraints.
- Editor — what to keep, what to rewrite, what to throw away.
The AI is the developer. You are the strategist, director and editor. That's the entire job. The split is roughly 40% strategist, 30% director, 30% editor on a healthy project. If you're spending 80% of your time as director, your context files are too thin.
A real example: foodla.eu
A multi-restaurant platform. Restaurants onboard themselves, manage menus, get found in search. Real users. Real money.
I built it in roughly 10 hours of focused work after writing context files. Lovable wrote the React. Supabase ran the database, auth and RLS. I made the product decisions, directed the build, and reviewed every meaningful diff.
Was I "coding"? Not by the 2018 definition. Was I building software that pays bills? Absolutely. That's the gap traditional terminology can't quite cover, which is why we needed a new word for it.
Who vibe coding is for
Three groups, in order of fit.
- Product-minded founders who want to ship their own ideas without hiring a team for the first 100 customers.
- Designers and PMs who always wanted to build but never wanted to fight tooling.
- Engineers willing to drop "I write every line" as part of their identity.
Group 3 is the most interesting one. The engineers who lean into vibe coding ship more than ever. The ones who refuse to are slowly being out-shipped.
What vibe coding is not for
Honesty section.
- Performance-critical systems work — game engines, databases, embedded.
- Codebases where every regression costs millions — fintech rails, medical devices.
- People who hate editing and only want to type.
If your domain is on this list, vibe coding is a tool in your kit, not your job description.
The skill stack of a working vibe coder
What I look for when I hire or collaborate:
- Can write a one-paragraph product brief without filler.
- Can read a code diff and notice what's missing, not just what's there.
- Knows the difference between a UI bug and a data model bug.
- Has shipped something real to real users — even tiny.
- Treats AI output as a draft, never a deliverable.
Notice what's not on the list: years of experience, framework certifications, a CS degree. Those help. They don't decide.
How vibe coding changed how I run Vi3ecoding
Three concrete shifts.
- I take on more client projects per quarter — without growing the team.
- I price by outcomes, not hours. The hours stopped being the constraint.
- I spend more time on briefs and reviews, less time on glue code.
The work feels more like editing a magazine than writing a novel. That trade has been worth it.
The future of the word
"Vibe coding" might not be the term we use in five years. The practice will outlive the label. Whatever we end up calling it — AI-assisted development, agentic engineering, product-led building — the shape is the same: humans decide, AI executes, humans review.
The people who learn to play all three roles well will outproduce specialists in any of them.
So — what is vibe coding, really?
It's not the death of coding. It's the rise of directing.
A vibe coder is a strategist with a development team made of AI tools and a willingness to ship.
The label will keep evolving. The practice is already here, paying rent for people like me who took it seriously early.