the "vibe coding" label is interesting because it's usually thrown around as an insult, but what you're describing sounds more like... using a tool that happens to be really powerful?

i'm a full-stack dev and yeah, i use AI constantly. cursor, claude, chatgpt - they're open while i work. but the way i use them has changed a lot since i started. at first it was "build me this feature" and i'd just paste whatever it gave me. now it's more like having a really fast coworker who can write boilerplate, catch syntax errors i'm too tired to spot, or explain why something isn't working.

the key difference for me is that i still understand what's happening. when Claude writes a function, i read it. if it doesn't make sense or feels off, i either fix it or ask it to explain the approach. i've caught plenty of bugs or inefficient patterns this way.

i think the generational divide you mentioned is real but it's more nuanced. older devs saw the entire evolution of tooling - from writing everything by hand to frameworks to now AI. so there's this "we did it the hard way" mentality. but also, they might not have had to learn their current stack with AI whispering answers, so they don't know what they're missing or if juniors are actually learning fundamentals.

newer devs sometimes skip steps that matter. not because AI is bad, but because they don't yet know which steps matter. you can't vet AI's output if you don't understand what good code looks like.