Stack Overflow Coders vs Today’s Vibe Coders

Back in the day, a lot of WordPress developers like me started out using existing themes and plugins, scanning Stack Overflow threads, copying snippets from other websites, and developing our skills along the way. Slowly finding our way around HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, React, Vue.js and the rest of it. That is exactly why the WordPress community, and open source as a whole, is great. It is vast, supportive, open and understanding.

Which raises a fair question now that a new generation is learning to build things by prompting an AI instead of searching a forum. Is that a different kind of developer, or the same story with better tooling?

Stack Overflow Generation

Did the old generation have a lot of beginners, or people with limited skills and knowledge? Those that just copied and pasted other people’s code and ran with it? Maybe. I certainly was one of them about 15 years ago, coming from a completely different field. I learned because technology always fascinated me. From my first MS-DOS class at my dad’s workplace in the 90s, to building sites in Flash, to launching my first Joomla! website with Google Ads on it. Eventually, when WordPress really took off — not just as a blogging platform but as a full-fledged CMS — I moved there. And I never looked back. That is the same story for a lot of other beginners: a passion, and a welcoming community. More on the latter later on. But they learned by using code other people shared and blogged about.

Community

WordPress is not just something you take and use. It is about sharing and helping one another. AI tends to take without giving back, and I hope that changes. That does not mean I avoid it — I use it every day in my own work, and I try to give back. People are social animals. In the end we want to share, be recognized, make a difference and help one another. That is what open source as a whole, and WordPress in particular, is all about. If that means beginners take first, that is fine. We pass on knowledge, and the ones who fall in love with it dig in, truly learn, and return the favor. That can happen in the WordPress community, where I spend most of my time, or in another open source forum, a Linux distribution, an Ansible or DevOps community, or somewhere else entirely. You can build themes and give them away, like our Elayne, Nynaeve and Aviendha series, or open source the tooling you lean on every day, like our wp-ops CLI. It took me years to get there, but here we are.

Stepping Stone

Does this mean lots of those newbies evolved into solid full-stack developers because of that community and the free availability of open source knowledge? For sure. Many fell in love and stayed. Some didn’t, and found other roads to things they liked better. I kept going, though I did drift into other work along the way before returning to web development and WordPress. The amount of code and know-how that is shared freely, there to learn from or simply to use, is fantastic. And that should never change. The old WordPress Codex, the developer documentation that replaced it, and the countless blog posts written on how to build WordPress and WooCommerce websites never cease to amaze me.

Vibe Coders

Will something like this happen with the current wave of vibe coders? Yes, if they are willing to go the extra mile. And I am fairly sure most of us do not want to be the extension of a machine, but the director of it all. Humans are curious. We want to learn, improve things, and improve ourselves.

I see Generation Alpha using ChatGPT, Claude and Mistral on a daily basis, for all kinds of homework and for coding. And no, they will not get into the nitty-gritty right away, even while they use AI to generate HTML games or Python scripts to outsmart Roblox. But they will eventually want more. Or they will hit the wall where they cannot explain to the AI what they actually want, because they lack the knowledge to describe it — I have run into that wall myself on a stubborn CSS bug, and that is usually the moment real learning starts. The WordPress newbie found that out by copying and pasting code. The new generation will find it out generating better code with AI. Curiosity never stops once you truly fall in love with something.

AI as Stepping Stone

AI, whether Mistral Vibe, Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, will allow young learners initially just to build, not really to learn, if they do not want to. But it is also a bridge. A walkway to learning, though with a more extensive runway. Those who really want to learn and become the developers of the future will simply have to integrate these tools, put them under their belt and find a way to learn enough so they can use them to the max. Like the Stack Overflow scavengers of the old days, they will get by just taking what is given.

Passion and Community will Prevail

I think that because AI really has come a long way, they will be able to hold off the inevitable steep learning curve for longer, to go beyond what AI can do and to learn where to take it as its master. But in the end the vibe coder will also have to get their toes wet, tread water and dive in eventually. And why not? Those that love tech, coding and solving puzzles will stay for that, and those that do not will get stuck spitting out code as a proxy of AI. I prefer to stay in the former camp. Don’t you?

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is vibe coding? Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want to an AI assistant and iterating on what it gives back, instead of writing every line yourself. It covers everything from a teenager generating a browser game to a professional developer scaffolding a feature and then reviewing the result.
• Can you become a real developer if you start with AI? Yes, on the same condition that applied to copying snippets from Stack Overflow: you have to get curious about why the code works. The people who stayed in WordPress did not stay because copying was easy. They stayed because they wanted to understand what they had pasted, and AI does not remove that requirement.
• Is AI a shortcut or a stepping stone? Both, depending on who is using it. AI lets you build without learning much, if building is all you want. It is also a bridge with a longer runway than Stack Overflow ever offered, because you can get further before you hit the point where you have to understand what you are shipping. The people who love the craft push past that point. The ones who do not stay stuck spitting out code as a proxy of AI.
• Does relying on AI hurt the open source community? It can. AI takes freely from open source without contributing much back, and that balance needs to change. It does not follow that individual developers should avoid the tools. It follows that they should keep giving back themselves, through code, documentation, plugins, themes, or answering the questions they once asked.
• Is the WordPress community still worth joining as a beginner? Yes. The documentation, the forums and the freely shared code are still the fastest route from copying snippets to understanding them, and the community is still open to people arriving from a completely different field.