Even if you’ve never cared much about programming or the technical world, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the term “vibe coding” floating around lately. And you probably didn’t hear it from a seasoned developer. Instead, you heard it from someone who swears they built an app over a weekend without really knowing how to code.

While I’ll admit I haven’t been vibe coding as much as I probably should (because what better way to execute the thousand ideas sitting in my Notes app?), I’ve been thinking a lot about what it actually means for learning. So, naturally, I did what I do best: I spent the last few days vibe-coding with the intention of seeing whether it could actually teach me something. Spoiler alert: it seems to have worked better than any tutorial I’ve forced myself to sit through.

What exactly is Vibe Coding?

Explained for people who don't code

Vibe coding is exactly what it sounds like: a style of programming where you fully lean into the vibes by describing what you’d like to create in natural language, waiting for an LLM to churn out a bunch of code, and then proceeding with the result without necessarily understanding every line of it.

Initially, it started with people pasting prompts into conversational AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc., and then copying and pasting the outputs into their projects. Fast-forward to today, and there’s a whole ecosystem of tools built specifically for vibe coding, including Replit, Lovable, and more.

ChatGPT and Claude have dedicated coding tools, Codex and Claude Code, respectively, that go beyond the chatbot experience and offer agentic coding capabilities right within the terminal. Similar to agentic IDEs like Antigravity and Cursor, all four of these fall under the broader umbrella of AI-assisted development, but they cater more to developers who understand coding already rather than the vibe coding crowd.

Vibe coding can be an excellent way to learn

If you’re disciplined enough to use it properly

Now, here’s the thing: the traditional way of learning is fundamentally flawed, especially when we look at the current times. Learning from textbooks the traditional way is still certainly excellent for building a deep understanding of fundamentals. However, it’s painfully slow as a primary method of learning to program in 2026. The reason most people abandon textbooks is that even after reading chapter after chapter, they still can’t really build anything that feels real.

With vibe coding, that problem vanishes. Within minutes, you can go from an idea to a working prototype. In my perspective, once you’ve seen an idea that’s been floating in your head for months come to life in real time, the motivation to understand how it actually works follows naturally.

All that said, the most important part of my argument here is the approach you take toward vibe coding — the intent you have going in. If you want to learn a programming language while seeing tangible results, vibe-code with the intention of building to learn. Instead of just accepting the output it generates, take the time to question it.

Read through every line that’s generated, and ask the AI to explain its decisions. Go ahead and break things within the code, and then figure out how to fix them yourself. This messy cycle of generating, studying, breaking, and repairing is where all the real learning actually happens.

For example, I’ve had an idea for an app I’ve wanted to code for years. Before AI and vibe coding existed, I would’ve spent months learning the basics before I could even start building it. With vibe coding, I was able to bring that idea to life in a fraction of the time. And in the process of understanding, tweaking, and fixing the generated code, I ended up learning more than any course could have taught me in the same timeframe.

Something the founder of LongCut, Zara Zhang, posted on X has really stuck with me.

She wrote an article with the title — To learn anything, first unlearn school. The title alone is the exact message I'm trying to get across. The traditional school model (memorize, then apply) doesn't work for most people. Vibe coding lets you throw that sequence out the window. You start by creating, and the understanding follows. As long as you're intentional about chasing it.

The key is vibe coding side projects you've always wanted to build

Build your dreams away

Given that my coding journey began before vibe coding existed, the top advice I've seen people give is to create side projects to learn. Typically, these projects would be ones that already exist. For instance, a to-do app, a weather app, a calculator, and essentially, clones of apps that you already have on your phone.

Now, while I think these projects are great ways to learn, is anyone really staying up until 3 AM debugging a calculator app they truthfully don't care about? With vibe coding, you can skip the generic projects and go straight to building something that actually matters to you. And when you're working with your own idea, the probability of you wanting to actually understand what's going on behind the scenes is much, much higher.

Vibe coding won't teach you everything, though

At least not yet

The biggest issue with us has always been that we tend to go all into anything and ignore everything else. Right now, that's vibe coding. It's incredibly easy to get so caught up in the speed and excitement of building with AI that you forget there's a whole layer of knowledge it simply can't hand to you. AI tools can generate code that works. But working and being production-ready are two very, very different things. As a professor of mine, who is also a software industry professional pouts it:

Things like security vulnerabilities, performance optimization, and writing code that another developer would be able to read and maintain months later are skills you won't really pick up from vibe coding.

Don't just rely on vibe coding

So, while I'm a huge advocate of utilizing vibe coding as a learning tool, I'd never recommend it as your only one. Use it to build, to stay motivated, and to see real results fast. However, make sure you're pairing it with the fundamentals.

Read documentation. Learn how things work under the hood. Understand why the AI made the choices it did, not just that it made them. Vibe coding is the starting line, not the finish line.