Is "Vibe Coding" Ruining My CS Degree?

The Sugar Rush of Speed 🍭 ## Imposter Syndrome 2.0 ## The Verdict? It’s 11 PM on a Tuesday in late 2025. I have a Data Structures assignment due tomorrow. The task? Implement a Red-Black Tree from scratch in C++. My professor, bless their old-school heart, wants us to "feel the pain of pointer management." My brain, fried from three lectures today, is screaming for an easier way. I open my IDE. I have GitHub Copilot Workspace open on one monitor, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on the other. I type: "Yo, I need a Red-Black Tree implementation in C++. Keep the vibe academic, handle the edge cases for rotation, and add comments that sound like a stressed undergrad wrote them." Thirty seconds later. Done. ✨ It compiles. It passes the test cases. It’s beautiful code. And I have absolutely no idea how it works. This is "Vibe Coding." It’s the dominant strategy for half my cohort, and honestly? I think it might be ruining my education. "Vibe Coding" is the evolution of prompt engineering. We aren't writing detailed specs anymore. We're just describing the intent—the vibe—and letting the models handle the boilerplate, the syntax, and the logic. It feels incredible. It’s intoxicating. What used to take me a weekend of agonizing over Stack Overflow threads now takes an hour of casual conversation with an LLM. I’m shipping side projects faster than ever. My GitHub contribution graph looks insane. I feel productive. I feel like a 10x developer. But then I sit in my Operating Systems lecture, and the professor asks a question about memory paging or race conditions, and my mind goes blank. The AI never mentioned that. The AI just made the "Segmentation Fault" go away so I could go back to scrolling TikTok. 🎭 Every CS student has imposter syndrome. But in 2025, it’s different. It’s not just "I’m not smart enough." It’s "I’m a fraud who is just really good at gluing together AI outputs." The terrifying realization hit me during a mock technical interview last month. I wasn't allowed to use Copilot. I had to reverse a linked list on a whiteboard. I knew what a linked list was. I knew why you’d reverse it. But the actual muscle memory of moving the pointers? The algorithm? It was gone. Atrophied because I’d outsourced that kind of "low-level thinking" to the machines for the last two years. It felt like I was a carpenter who only knew how to order pre-built cabinets from IKEA, suddenly asked to build one from raw lumber. The CS Degree vs. The Real World This creates a massive conflict in university right now. The Academia Vibe: "You must understand the fundamentals! Build it in C! Understand the Big O notation!" The Industry Vibe (in 2025): "Ship it yesterday. Use whatever tools make you fastest. If you aren't using AI, you're already behind." If I keep Vibe Coding my way through this degree, am I going to be useless when the AI hits a wall it can't climb? Finding the Balance: From "Do It" to "Teach Me" I’m not going to stop using AI. That would be professional suicide in 2025. Pandora’s box is open. But I am changing how I use it. I’m trying to move from passive consumption to active interrogation. If I Vibe Code a solution, I force myself to do what I call a "Reverse Vibe Check": Don't just copy-paste: I type out the AI-generated code myself. It sounds stupid, but it forces my brain to process the syntax. The "Explain Like I'm 5" Prompt: Once the code works, I open a fresh chat and paste it back in: "Explain this code to me like I’m a first-year CS student who hates math. Focus on the 'why', not just the 'what'." Break it on purpose: I ask the AI, "What are three ways this implementation could fail in a high-load production environment?" This teaches me the edge cases the happy-path "vibe" missed. Vibe Coding isn't ruining my degree. My reliance on it to skip the hard parts is ruining my degree. AI is the best tutor ever invented, but it's also the world's easiest enabler of laziness. The challenge for us juniors in late 2025 isn't learning to prompt better; it's having the discipline to close the chat window and stare at the broken code until we understand why it’s broken. Are you Team Vibe😎🍹 or Team Grind? 😢🧠 Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Modern CS struggle... Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse - Location United Arab Emirates - Joined Oct 17, 2025