AI researchers propose 'CraftCoding' to counter 'Vibe Coding', warning programmers not to lose their skills
An AI professor warns that letting AI write all code without understanding will cause programmers to lose their skills, proposing to use AI as a 'reviewer' instead.
Peter Bloem, an AI and Computer Science researcher and lecturer, published an essay on his personal blog criticizing the phenomenon of 'Vibe Coding,' which refers to relying on AI to generate code from prompts while programmers barely understand the actual code produced. He proposed an opposing approach called 'Craft Coding.'
The core message of the article is a warning about the risks of using AI to generate code without verification. Besides resulting in poor-quality code, this causes developers to lose their skills and deep system understanding.
The Craft Coding approach he proposes is for programmers to write code primarily by hand to maintain skills and comprehension, with clear practical recommendations such as: disabling AI Autocomplete features inside the IDE, always developing code manually first, and limiting AI's role to reading code for review, helping find edge cases (edge scenarios that could break the program), and explaining code logic.
It should be noted that this is an opinion and study piece, not the launch of any tool or organizational policy. However, the article has gained significant attention in the developer community on Hacker News, with over 43 discussion comments and 67 points. People are discussing the issue of 'Deskilling'—how AI degrades programmers' skills—along with questions about where the 'appropriate' boundary of AI usage in programming should lie. Tech news outlets like TheFrontPage.dev have also reported on the debate between these two concepts.
As AI coding tools are booming, this debate reflects a major industry question about how much programmers should use AI without losing their own skills, which directly concerns Thai developers and IT students who are training or working in this era.