Is 'Vibe Coding' Ruining My CS Degree?

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

It’s 11 PM on a Tuesday in late 2025. I have a Data Structures assignment due tomorrow: implement a Red‑Black Tree from scratch in C++. My professor, bless their old‑school heart, wants us to “feel the pain of pointer management.” My brain, fried from three lectures today, is screaming for an easier way. I open my IDE, with GitHub Copilot Workspace on one monitor and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on the other.

“Yo, I need a Red‑Black Tree implementation in C++. Keep the vibe academic, handle the edge cases for rotation, and add comments that sound like a stressed undergrad wrote them.”

Thirty seconds later: the code compiles, passes the test cases, looks beautiful, and I have absolutely no idea how it works. This is Vibe Coding—the dominant strategy for half my cohort, and honestly, I think it might be ruining my education.

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What Is Vibe Coding?

Vibe Coding is the evolution of prompt engineering. Instead of writing detailed specifications, we describe the intent—the vibe—and let the models handle the boilerplate, syntax, and logic. It feels incredible and intoxicating. What used to take a weekend of agonizing over Stack Overflow now takes an hour of casual conversation with an LLM. I’m shipping side projects faster than ever, and my GitHub contribution graph looks insane. I feel productive, like a 10× developer.

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The Impact on Learning

Classroom Struggles

When I sit in my Operating Systems lecture and the professor asks about memory paging or race conditions, my mind goes blank. The AI never mentioned those details; it simply made the “Segmentation Fault” go away so I could scroll TikTok.

Interview Reality

During a mock technical interview last month, I wasn’t allowed to use Copilot. I had to reverse a linked list on a whiteboard. I froze. I knew what a linked list was and why to reverse it, but the muscle memory of moving pointers and the algorithm itself had atrophied after outsourcing that low‑level thinking to machines for two years. It felt like a carpenter who only knows how to order pre‑built IKEA cabinets being asked to build one from raw lumber.

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The CS Degree vs. The Real World

• The Academia Vibe: “You must understand the fundamentals! Build it in C! Understand the Big O notation!”
• The Industry Vibe (2025): “Ship it yesterday. Use whatever tools make you fastest. If you aren’t using AI, you’re already behind.”

If I keep Vibe Coding my way through this degree, will I be useless when the AI hits a wall it can’t climb?

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Finding the Balance: From “Do It” to “Teach Me”

I’m changing how I use AI, moving from passive consumption to active interrogation.

1. Reverse Vibe Check – After Vibe Coding a solution, I type out the AI‑generated code myself. It sounds stupid, but it forces my brain to process the syntax.

2. Explain‑Like‑I’m‑5 Prompt – Once the code works, I open a fresh chat and paste it back in:

   “Explain this code to me like I’m a first‑year CS student who hates math. Focus on the why, not just the what.”

3. Break It on Purpose – I ask the AI, “What are three ways this implementation could fail in a high‑load production environment?” This teaches me the edge cases the happy‑path vibe missed.

Vibe Coding isn’t ruining my degree; my reliance on it to skip the hard parts is. AI is the best tutor ever invented, but it’s also the world’s easiest enabler of laziness. The challenge for us juniors in late 2025 isn’t learning to prompt better; it’s having the discipline to close the chat window and stare at the broken code until we understand why it’s broken.

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Conclusion

Are you Team Vibe 😎🍹 or Team Grind? 😢🧠