Vibe coding is the act of telling an AI what you want to program and letting it write all the code for you. When it was first adopted, it was supposed to embody the sort of care-free optimism that was running in AI circles at the time, high off the possibilities of the tech. AI models had become so powerful that you could build an app using the same conversational language that you deploy while confiding in ChatGPT.
But the “vibes” are different now. Programmers were quickly forced to grapple with the new reality that AI coding tools brought to their profession. Now that everyone’s using AI to churn out code, you have to crank out even more work to keep up and meet your boss’s quota. It may be more “efficient” — and even that’s contested, since someone needs to do the hard work of verifying all that AI pablum — but it hasn’t exactly made people’s jobs easier. Meanwhile, everyone with a Claude subscription and a half-baked app idea fancies themselves a bona fide programmer, too.
In sum, vibe coding has gone from a novelty to something viewed as a necessary evil, or worse, as an object of suspicion. It’s no longer something to brag about. A recent tweet making the rounds in tech circles perhaps encapsulates this shift, joking about using the term “cuck coding” instead of vibe coding “because you just sit in a chair and watch.” Even posters on r/ClaudeCoding found the humor in it.
Vibe coding can churn out marvelous work, but it’s hard to divorce the optimism around it from the clueless bosses who are forcing their employees to heavily use AI to code. Epic Games, the game developer behind the mega hit shooter Fortnite, reportedly went the extra step of basically mandating actual vibes-based coding, telling employees that there would be “no more hand-written code” and that the unnamed game they were working on should be “generated with full AI workflows.” Epic was later met with waves of mockery for bragging that it “vibe coded” its game launcher to be faster than its competitor Steam.
As vulgar as the term sounds, maybe “cuck coding” is indeed the term that more accurately reflects what’s actually going on. You watch and burn… lots of tokens.
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