I don’t see vibe coders without experience as serious competitors. They can quickly get a first working version. But in real work the value is understanding what must not break and noticing a failure before the user does.
Build a simple smoke tester for your project — a script that checks the main scenarios after every change.
1. Write down 3–5 critical actions: login, creating an entity, search, payment, sending a message.
2. For each, set the expected result: a URL, a response status, a text fragment or a field in JSON.
3. Save the checks in checks.json. Don’t describe the whole product — only the things you’d be ashamed of if they went down.
4. Ask AI to write a script that goes through the list and exits with an error on the first failure. The check logic can be like this: assert response.status_code == expected_status
5. Run it before deployment and after changes made by AI.
Generating code has become cheap. The ability to define invariants and build a feedback loop hasn’t. That’s where the developer’s advantage remains.