Vibe coding is gambling: why AI-assisted development is becoming a game of chance

Watching how AI is embedded at work and home, I notice a simple trend: it becomes harder to write code yourself, more and more you want to delegate it to a generator. And it's not just me — AI providers incentivize more tokens, managers demand teams use tools more actively, and social media circulates jokes about a CEO calling to consume tokens for consumption's sake. In large companies, a hidden race is already underway: who has more AI, who has more automation, who can show faster that "we're in the game too." But calling this engineering anymore is difficult.

From Engineering to Gambling

When a developer generates code and doesn't verify the result, this is no longer working with a tool — this is a bet on luck. You throw a request at the model, get an answer, paste it into the project and hope it works. If you're lucky — great.

If not — you write a new request. This is gambler behavior, not engineer behavior. An engineer understands what they're doing, verifies, tests, takes responsibility for the result.

A gambler puts stakes down and waits for the cards to fall lucky. When this happens once — it might be luck. But when the entire development becomes just generating requests to AI, it's no longer luck — it's a system of gambling.

Accumulating Risks

• Security — generated code contains vulnerabilities that nobody really checked
• Performance — a piece works, but slows down the application or causes a memory leak
• Technical debt — AI generates fast, but not optimally; later the team pays by rewriting
• Responsibility — if code crashed production, who's guilty? The one who wrote the request?
• Loss of skills — young developers don't learn to analyze logic, just copy

The first two risks are noticeable right away. But technical debt and loss of skills — that's slow poison. Code that works today will become a nightmare tomorrow when it needs to be changed. And a developer who spent two years just generating requests will be helpless when AI doesn't give the needed answer.

Pressure from Above

Managers demand activity: "Use AI, automate, more features, faster!" Companies fear falling behind and start a race for quantity. This creates wrong incentives. Instead of quality — speed. Instead of thinking — generation. Instead of learning — copying. A manager sees in Jira: yesterday 3 tasks closed, today 15. This looks like success. But what's inside? What's the code quality? Nobody asks — scary to know.

What This Means

AI is not the enemy of engineering, it's a powerful tool. But a tool requires mastery. The difference between vibe coding and conscious use of AI is simple: in the first case you roll the dice, in the second you understand what you're doing, verify, take responsibility. AI should accelerate an engineer's work, not replace engineering. When this happens the other way around, code becomes gambling, the company falls into a trap of fast pace and low quality. Balance between speed and control — that's all that's needed.