In 1995, at 14, I skipped school to spend the whole day with a little INFO magazine that taught how to make a web page in 10 steps. I made a page with a white background and black type, then learned to use Paint Shop Pro, placed an ad in Primeiramão, and got my first client. Nobody called me a programmer; I just wanted to get an idea online.
I remembered that while watching how many people turn up their noses at vibecoding and say that is not real programming. That argument is old. The copyists said the same thing about the printed book, painters said it about photography, and Kodak even invented the digital camera in 1975 and put it in a drawer to protect film. Whoever defended the barrier instead of creation usually fell behind. Vibecoding did not end programming; it removed the toll imposed on anyone who had an idea but did not know the syntax.
In 2017 I wrote in my book that innovation only happens in the mess, in the middle of chaos, and that what is truly innovative takes big risks, irritates a lot of people, and can very well be misunderstood. I also wrote that people looking from the outside usually see the bigger picture. Today outsiders can build, and that bothers people.
On the security argument, that is not what I am talking about here. Insecure applications written by hand—by very experienced people—are everywhere. In recent weeks, critical flaws that had been there for more than ten years were found in PHP itself, which powers about 70% of the world’s sites. There have also been vulnerabilities in Node.js and Plex, attacks on Railway and LiteLLM, and a government rushing to take a site offline. PHP, by the way, was the language I learned in 1999.
Nothing against people who write every line by hand; I started that way too. But it was AI that found those flaws in PHP—the same AI behind vibecoding today. Studies still show that AI-generated code has its own security problems, and I will not pretend otherwise. Still, an AI that can find flaws that went unnoticed for more than ten years will learn not to put those flaws in the code much faster than any person. My bet is that, before long, vibecoding will be safer than code written 100% by hand.
Originally published on X: https://x.com/adrianomeirinho/status/2115109130138468388