Vibe coding is not coding

In The Pragmatic Programmer David Thomas and Andrew Hunt called it "Programming by Coincidence" (Chapter 6). Programmers not actively thinking about their code might get it to work, but they don't know why. When it breaks, the programmer doesn't know why and they can't fix it, because they never knew why it worked it in the first place.

Refactoring a very large codebase into components that can be understood independently may seem daunting, but not doing it is a matter of unwillingness not incapability.

I believe LLMs are definitely able to, in some vague sense, understand the code they’re working with. If they’re able to produce meaningful output from the input, especially in abstract problems, they get the gist of what’s being coded, not just the tokens. That’s what they’re storing in their inner representations: higher-level view of the text they’re processing.