We need to talk about Vibe Coding. For some reason, the standard advice in the ecosystem has become “just prompt it,” and it’s quietly killing architectural integrity. After 14+ years of wrestling with WordPress and WooCommerce, I’ve seen plenty of “miracle” tools, but this one has a specific catch: you’re trading implementation intimacy for a false sense of control.
I recently read a story about a developer who built a complex RAG-style system in 25 hours using nothing but LLM prompts. It worked—until it didn’t. When the time came to containerize it and fix a pathing bug, they realized they had no idea how the plumbing worked. They had become a conductor who couldn’t play a single instrument in their own orchestra.
Vibe Coding and the Technical Debt Hangover
In the WordPress world, Vibe Coding usually looks like scaffolding a custom plugin or a complex WooCommerce integration via GitHub Copilot or Cursor. You describe the hook, you ask for the transient logic, and you let the AI fill in the 500 lines of boilerplate. It feels amazing. You “ship it” twice as fast as your colleague who is still manually checking the wp_remote_get() response codes.
But there is a hangover. When you don’t write the code, the mental model never enters your head. You haven’t suffered through the edge cases, so you don’t know where the Race Condition is hiding. You haven’t manually traced the Filter execution order, so when a third-party plugin conflicts, you’re stuck copy-pasting stack traces back into a chat window, hoping for a miracle.
This loss of “implementation intimacy” is a massive contributor to technical debt in AI development. You aren’t building a codebase; you’re inheriting one from a very fast, very opinionated, and occasionally hallucinating contractor.
The Naive Prompt vs. The Senior Refactor
Let’s look at a classic example: fetching external data for a custom block. A “Vibe Coder” might accept the first AI suggestion because it “works” on the local environment.
// The Vibe Coding approach: It works, but it's fragile.
function bbioon_get_external_data() {
$response = wp_remote_get( 'https://api.example.com/data' );
$body = wp_remote_retrieve_body( $response );
return json_decode( $body );
}A senior dev knows this is a ticking time bomb. What happens if the API is down? What if the response isn’t JSON? Where is the caching? The refactored version—the one you actually *own*—handles the Transient logic and error states that AI often glosses over to keep the “vibe” positive.
// The Vibe Coder's Fix: Adding actual ownership and performance logic.
function bbioon_get_external_data_vetted() {
$cache_key = 'bbioon_api_data';
$data = get_transient( $cache_key );
if ( false !== $data ) {
return $data;
}
$response = wp_remote_get( 'https://api.example.com/data', [ 'timeout' => 5 ] );
if ( is_wp_error( $response ) || 200 !== wp_remote_retrieve_response_code( $response ) ) {
return false; // Or a fallback object.
}
$data = json_decode( wp_remote_retrieve_body( $response ) );
set_transient( $cache_key, $data, HOUR_IN_SECONDS );
return $data;
}Conducting the Machine Without Losing the Craft
I’m not a Luddite. I use these tools every day. But there’s a difference between using an AI to speed up the “low-level implementation work” and letting it dictate your architecture. If you can’t debug the code when the internet is down, you don’t own the site—the machine does. Furthermore, you should look into clean WordPress AI integrations to ensure your prompts are actually following best practices.
Specifically, the WordPress community is trying to bridge this gap with initiatives like Agent Skills for WordPress. These are portable bundles of instructions that help AI assistants follow established patterns rather than guessing. It helps, but it doesn’t replace the need for you to read the source code.
Look, if this Vibe Coding stuff is eating up your dev hours and leaving you with a broken site you can’t fix, let me handle it. I’ve been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
The Takeaway: Implementation Still Matters
The productivity gap between those using AI and those who don’t is widening. Consequently, the pressure to “vibe code” everything is high. However, you must maintain your implementation intimacy. Be the lead architect, but don’t forget how to use the hammer. Use AI for documentation, boilerplate, and WP-CLI command scaffolding, but verify every line before you ship it to production. Your future self—the one debugging at 2 AM—will thank you.
