Yeah, the original meaning of Vibe Coding was "not looking at the code, just going on vibes", but a lot of people now use it to mean "AI was involved in some way".

I see a whole spectrum between those two. I typically alternate between "writing code manually and asking AI for code examples" (ChatGPT coding), and "giving AI specific instructions like, write a function blarg that does foo".

The latter I call Power Coding, in the sense of power armor, because you're still in control and mostly moving manually, but you're much stronger and faster.

I like this better than "tell agent to make a bunch of changes and come back later" because first of all it doesn't break flow (you can use a smaller model for such fine-grained changes so it goes very fast -- it's "realtime"), and second, you don't ever desync from the codebase and need to spend extra time figuring out what the AI did. Each change is sanity-checked as it comes in.

So you stay active, and the code stays slop-free.

I don't hear a lot of people doing this though? Maybe we just don't have good language for it.