Vibe coding is better than the alternative
For frontline IT workers, the alternative to vibe coding is often not professional software. It is manual work, brittle spreadsheets and tools that never get built.
The critics are right. Vibe-coded software is not, at the moment, reliably production-grade. It can be poorly understood and hard to maintain.
But the alternative is not a well-engineered suite of tools backed by a development team, project managers and VC funding. It is repetitive clicks through a web UI, failing Excel spreadsheets and code snippets copied from ancient Stack Overflow posts.
For many frontline IT professionals, software development is not their primary discipline. Even for people like me, who can write useful scripts but are not software engineers by trade, the difference between a quick script and real internal tooling can mean weeks of work. During that time, every other competing priority of IT life still has to be managed and battled with.
Vibe coding gives real autonomy and power to the people who understand these problems best, because they deal with them, often in painfully archaic ways, day in, day out. It gives them a lever to increase their own productivity without waiting for development teams whose ticket queues are already full. It means end users receive better, more consistent support.
Administrators no longer have to suffer the tedium of Microsoft’s ever-changing menu flows or the RSI-inducing, Sisyphean tasks of yesteryear. They can build the CLI tools, log ingestors, API clients and internal utilities they have wanted for years.
None of this means that unreviewed code should be trusted blindly with production systems. Blast radius still matters. A tool that handles credentials, makes destructive changes or becomes critical to the business deserves proper review, testing, documentation and ownership. The point is not that engineering no longer matters. It is that far more problems can now reach a useful first solution.
Vibe coding does not currently reach the ceiling of well-engineered software built by large teams of professional programmers. But it raises the floor for everyone else and brings the two significantly closer together.
And in a year or two? Who knows? If you’d told me three years ago that I could start an hour-long Codex session from my smartphone, walk away and come back to a functional piece of software, I’d never have believed you.
So perhaps, if your last experience of vibe coding was laughing at the feeble attempts of GPT-4 or Gemini 2.5, spend a little time with Opus 5 or GPT-5.6. Give one of them a problem you actually deal with. Write a well-reasoned, detailed prompt explaining the issue, and you may just be surprised.