'Got Humbled': Vibe Coder Caught Using AI By Boss Gets Schooled

NDTV

a day ago

For a long time, writing code meant that software engineers sat long hours in front of a computer, typing out lines of instructions in a programming language. But in recent times, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has allowed anyone to 'vibe code', meaning the technology churns out the code after a user feeds it what they want. Now, an intern working at two places who used a similar modus operandi has revealed how the vibe conding tactic backfired for them.
As per the now-viral post, the user said they were using Cursor/GPT to ship the product quickly whilst working at two companies.
"I'm currently interning at 2 companies SRE at one, and SDE at a very early-stage startup (like 20 employees). At the startup, it's just me and the CTO in tech. They're funded ($5M), but super early," wrote the user in the r/developersIndia subreddit.
While all was going well, the CTO of one of the companies started asking them in-depth questions about their code and this is where things turned pear-shaped.
"The CTO started asking deep dive questions about the code. Stuff like, "Why did you structure it this way?" or "Explain what this function does internally." The code was mostly AI-generated, and I honestly couldn't explain parts of it properly."
"He straight up told me: "I don't mind if you use AI, but you have to know what your code is doing." Then he started explaining my code to me. Bruh. I was cooked."
The OP said the entire experience was 'super humbling' as he had been vibe coding without really understanding the "deeper stuff like architecture, modularisation, and writing clean, production-level code".
'How did you even...'
As the post went viral, garnering hundreds of upvotes, social media users agreed with the CTO's remarks, while others questioned how the OP had landed the internship without knowing what the code meant.
"I am working as QA, and you can't replace experience. You will have to learn over time. But asking questions is also a good approach. Why and how," said one user while another added: "Get to know your application's core system design. Decide your architecture which can scale in production later. Now use this as a knowledge base in Cursor/ChatGPT."
A third commented: "If you can't say what that code is doing by looking at it, then how did you even get 2 internships?"
A fourth said: "Best way to learn how to write clean code is reading open source project code. Hands down its the best way to learn plus have a curious mind."
Notably, the term vibe coding has been popularised by Andrej Karpathy, who has worked with companies like Tesla and OpenAI.