When I started thinking about the problems with coding education in 2019, “tutorial hell” was enemy number one. You’d know you were living in it if you:

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The coding education landscape has shifted from "tutorial hell" (passive video consumption) to "vibe code hell" where learners over-rely on AI coding assistants. While students can now build projects faster with tools like Cursor and Claude, they often fail to develop deep understanding of how software works. AI tools can be valuable for learning when used as Socratic tutors rather than code generators, but the sycophantic nature of LLMs and their tendency to agree with users creates new learning challenges. Effective learning still requires discomfort and independent problem-solving, whether that means turning off tutorial videos or disabling AI autocomplete.

I'm in Vibe Code Hell

Vibe code hell is definitely a thing. The industry still doesn’t understand the impact of vibe coding on the new generation and how it will affect their ability to learn and dive into complex problems. It’s a tool that must be used with care. It’s not a substitute to learning which many thinks

I’m starting to see the issue isn’t AI or any particular tool we have, it’s people’s avoidance of learning. I’m sure when people started coding in C those writing Assembly thought they were lazy and would lose major concepts in how code works. I’m sure when Stack Overflow became popular people assumed programmers again were lazy and depended on answers more than reading documentation. People always want to blame the tool instead of the reality that most people don’t want to learn how something works. They just want to build something. And on the other hand you have programmers that understand how everything works and build complicated things that no one wants to use. Whether it’s learning code, people skills, or customers in demographics, no matter what the issue is people don’t want to have to learn.

Vibe coding doesnt exist. Its called shit coding, where you allow AI to scramble your apps code like some eggs. AI agents are good for 2 things and 2 things only. Its for creating a super basic templates and maybe, just maybe assisting you in some super basic app for MVP only.
Other than that its a useless thing. I tried multiple times to make some apps and anything after initial app creation (just a boilerplate) it fails miserably. You constantly have to review the code, it adds unnecessary logic, if you amend smth, it will not remove unused code etc. Its just bad… Ofc when you have 0 understanding of how to code, you think AI agents are magical creatures.

A JR developer on my team finished a task that should have taken at least 4 hours in 30 minutes. I analyzed the PR and it was clear that he used “vibe coding” to get it done. There were pieces of code that shouldn’t have been deleted that were, and texts that weren’t even described in the task that were changed. He simply threw the Jira ticket at the AI, hit send, and accepted what came back. Long story short, what was supposed to be a 4-hour job turned into 2 days of work.
Please, if you are a JR DEV, we are NOT expecting you to finish tasks quickly. We want you to learn and finish them in the best way possible. Deliver the best you can, and if you don’t know something, ASK what’s wrong, whether it’s a senior dev or the AI. Don’t use AI to SOLVE the problem, but rather to ASK how to solve it.

Very well written and content-wise good article.
It offers a lot of inspiration to continue thinking about the topic and I would like to chime in on one aspect mentioned.
I agree that, platforms like Stack Overflow were “too good” at telling people, when they were wrong, especially when most of the time, they were only partially wrong, yet they were told, as if their whole life were wrong… Which is why I never indulged too much as an answer giver there, because I found the system counter productive.
The platform is way too strict. Many of the hardcore always-online moderators there are pretty much there, not for the original purpose of helping people, but to move around topics, to keep thing “clean” and “neat”, disregarding the fact, that the platform is there to help people help themselves learning better and improving their skills.
Just look at how much drama there is about supposed “duplicate” topics, even though they are not duplicate, because the new topic is about a slightly yet significantly different situation, whereas the supposed already answered question is already 10+ years old and not applicable anyway, due to the different situation back then.
Over the years, I’ve seen tons of valid questions being marked as duplicate or moved around without an end, just because those moderators felt like the absolutely immaculate order from another universe must be applied to the site.
Many years ago, I mostly stopped posting there and so did many others, who I knew. We all changed to different, more learning-friendly platforms. Some stopped posting altogether and only kept reading.
Stack Overflow is a good platform for reading up answers to, where the questions are often marked as duplicate 😉, but it can be very discouraging to actually ask there anything, as you will usually receive so many down votes for your first few answers and the worst thing about it is, that nobody is telling you why. Again, if they would be interested in you learning how to better ask, they would explain the down vote. They actually never do, which means, they only want to down vote to diminish a question, rather than improve the situation.
I’ve seen tons of people ask in the comments, why the down votes happened. Nobody of the down voters ever answered. Sometimes only third parties answered with their ideas on why it might e happened. Not only seen that happening, but people told me the same thing, back then.