Vibe Coder vs. Software Engineer

The article distinguishes between "vibe coders" who use AI to quickly generate prototypes and "software engineers" who consider the entire development lifecycle, including review, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Rather than measuring success by speed of initial code generation, the author argues that AI-assisted work should be evaluated by "time to safe merge"—accounting for review complexity, test quality, and integration costs—and should produce better, narrower code, not more of it.