A million Claude monkeys: how vibe coding is changing the profession

A new archetype of developer has emerged: one who writes a prompt for Claude, looks at the generated code, tweaks it a bit, and ships it to production. On Habr this was called vibecoding — coding by feel, without a plan, relying on intuition and AI assistance.

How it works

Vibecoding is when you don't sit down to design the system. You open your IDE, write a brief description of the task in ChatGPT/Claude, get code, look at it, add your observations to the prompt, generate again, test. It's an iterative process where AI is your pair programmer, only more patient and free (or cheap). Things that used to take a day of planning now take an hour of experiments. This incredibly accelerates prototyping. For MVPs, PoCs, startups — it works so well that you can't ignore this approach anymore.

Problems that emerge

But there's a dark side. When you rely on AI, you risk:

• Not understanding why the code works — you just copied it
• Accumulating technical debt because there was no preliminary design
• Running into classic mistakes that AI repeats from its training data
• Losing intuition about performance, security, scalability
• Creating code that works on examples but fails on real data

Million Claude monkeys — this is irony. Just as a monkey at an old typewriter might someday write Shakespeare, so a million developers who simply run prompts through Claude might someday accidentally write good code. But that's not a guarantee and not a strategy.

Natural selection has already begun

Those who survive in the vibecoding era are those who learned to use AI as a tool, but not as a replacement for thinking. They:

• Know which prompt to ask to get the desired result
• Can read generated code and find errors
• Understand when AI is hallucinating
• Can combine pieces of code into a working system
• Remember how to write code by hand if AI fails

Those who just copy-paste and hope for the best — they either leave the profession quickly (when production development starts) or remain juniors who can't solve problems without AI.

What this means

Vibecoding is not the death of the profession, it's its transformation. Engineering thinking remains critically important, just the tools have changed. Developers who adapted and learned to work with AI as a partner got a huge speed boost. Those who ignored this trend fell behind. And those who believed that AI would completely replace them — they were mistaken.