Engineers Argue AI Vibe Coding Needs a Design Spec Before the Build Begins

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A software engineering debate has emerged around 'vibe coding,' the practice of using AI agents to build software driven largely by intuition and rapid iteration. Developer Don Johnson proposed a loop — Vibe, Build, Break, Understand, Stabilize, Perfect — arguing that intuition alone is not the flaw, but stopping there is. A responding engineer contends that this loop, while valuable, still allows AI agents to generate sprawling codebases before any human-defined boundaries or specifications are in place. The critic proposes inserting a lightweight spec and design-review phase before the build step, shifting the division of labor so humans define intent and constraints first, then verify AI output rather than reverse-engineer it. Drawing on experience testing a cardiovascular device, the author warns that validating an implementation is meaningless if the underlying model of the problem is wrong — a risk amplified when AI can produce dozens of files and dependencies in a single build step.

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