Is vibe engineering beneath a developer's dignity?

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 24:00:00 GMT

This is my first article in a few years, and it comes with a major visual overhaul of my whole site. That felt like a good excuse to tell the backstory: how a spontaneous decision over one weekend led me to revive the blog in a totally new look – and to hunt for the key question: does using AI to write code make you less of a developer?

Let me start with a bit of history. This year, as I’ve counted, marks exactly 20 years since I first put a website out into the world. I initially built it in Word (yes, really!), then moved on to FrontPage. WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get – was the umbrella term for pretty much all the visual editors used to build simple websites back then. There were quite a few of them, all promising massive shortcuts, yet even with their help, building websites was never entirely trivial. With one interesting exception, at least from today’s perspective: making things work in Internet Explorer (the Chrome monopolist of its era, except it didn’t even respect its own web standards).

Some time later I got curious about content management systems (CMS), including one of the more popular options of that era: PHP-Fusion. It was a small technical miracle, but free hosting limits made editing code impossible. Annoyed by those limits, I got serious about programming. I wanted a dynamically managed site that I’d build from scratch.

Jan Pogocki

Is vibe engineering beneath a developer's dignity?