Where it shines
Vibe coding is genuinely transformative for:
- Greenfield scaffolding. Spinning up a new app, wiring routes, setting up config — work that's tedious but well-trodden.
- Boilerplate and glue. CRUD endpoints, form validation, data transforms, adapters between two APIs.
- Unfamiliar territory. A language or you don't know well. The model knows the idioms; you supply the judgment.
- Refactors and migrations. "Convert these promises to async/await," "split this 400-line file by responsibility."
- Throwaway exploration. Prototypes you'll rewrite anyway. Speed matters more than polish.
In these zones, a clear plus a careful review beats hand-typing every time.
The common thread is that these tasks are well-trodden and verifiable. The model has seen ten thousand CRUD endpoints, so it produces idiomatic ones; and you can tell at a glance whether the result is right. When both of those are true — common pattern, cheap to check — vibe coding is close to pure upside.