Assisted coding era has started ?

One of the emerging trends fueled by the AI revolution, is assisted coding where AI agents are "pairing" wuth developers to write code more efficiently. The potential of this technology has generated considerable excitement among anybody interested in coding, and a new term Vibe Coding has sprung up, popularized by an OpenAI computer scientist.

Vibe Coding disrupts the approach to coding. It consists in establishing a collaborative workflow where the programmer interacts with an AI agent, within its coding process. In practice it can be quite simple : the programmer starts by providing a clear prompt describing the desired code functionality – for example, “Create a Python function to calculate the factorial of a number.” The AI agent then responds with code designed to fulfill that task.

But it's not magic, unless the user is very lucky and the request is relatively simple or expressed very clearly in detail, the anwser will rarely answer the initial request at 100%. AI agents, even sophisticated ones, can misinterpret prompts or generate incomplete or buggy code.

This is where the ‘Vibe’ comes in – the programmer will continue the workflow within an iterative process of refinement. You’ll likely engage in a cycle of providing subsequent prompts, guiding the agent towards a better solution. The developper will interact with the agent, just like if it was teaching a fast but directionless junior developer.
But the sucess of the Vibe coding result depends heavily on the ability of the programmer to understand and evaluate the generated code. For a non-coder, this process can be demanding, requiring a significant investment of energy, time and effort. The question "is it good code?" will probably remain unanswered unless the coder takes the time to analyze the answer and by doing so, and gets better himself at coding.

However, this engagement is *exactly* what’s valuable. Analyzing the code, even if it’s not perfect, helps the coder learn and strengthen its coding skills – much like learning a new language by grappling with its grammar and syntax. It forces you to think critically about algorithms and data structures.

AI tools like these should stay considered as a assistants, augmenting human creativity and efficiency. The rise of vibe coding hopefully will introduce many people to coding in different languages, in different contexts, which is something good for our society.

Just like in the 1990's, when I started coding in VBA, my vision of automated tasks in Excel changed completely when I discovered that I could ask Excel to record my actions, that the tool would transform automaticly in VBA code, that I could review and adapt later on.

Of course, code still needs to be debugged and refactored, but from now on, thanks to the availability of these assistants, we won't have to start our projects from scratch with an empty sheet.