Vibe Coders, Cert Chasers & the Death of “Why”: How Tech Lost Its Soul

There was a time—believe it or not—when getting into tech meant being curious. It meant asking questions like “Why does this work?” not just “How do I pass this coding test?” Today? We've turned the industry into a glorified certification mill. Everyone’s scrambling to slap buzzwords onto resumes like stickers on a laptop, without bothering to understand the machinery beneath them.

Certs. Projects. LinkedIn posts about #AI. Rinse. Repeat.

Welcome to modern tech—a place once known for exploration, now reduced to a conveyor belt of vibe coders and resume alchemists.

The First System Design Workshop That Broke Me

I still remember walking into my first system design workshop. The topic: how a healthcare system processes patient admission, testing, and treatment. Having been in and out of hospitals myself, I figured I had an intuitive sense of how this should flow.

Then the jargon tsunami hit.

Everyone around me was name-dropping frameworks like they were flexing gym gains—Kubernetes this, Kafka that. I recognized the words but didn’t understand the logic. Nobody stopped to ask, “Why are we even using this tool?” Just plug, play, pretend.

As someone new to tech, the feeling wasn’t just confusion—it was straight-up existential. I went home questioning if I even belonged.

The Great Pretenders

Now, on the flip side, I see another breed of confusion: those confidently throwing around technical terms like AI agents, RAG, vector stores, and LLM pipelines—without a clue about what any of it actually means.

Do you even know when to use RAG? Can you articulate how retrieval systems affect latency? Or are you just regurgitating what ChatGPT fed you in bullet points?

Listen, copying code from ChatGPT doesn’t make you technical. It makes you good at Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.

Tech Has an Honesty Problem

I once had a conversation with a volunteer. Her mentee asked:
"What certification should I do to get hired?"

Wrong question.

She answered perfectly:
"It’s not about the number of certs. It’s about whether you actually understand the concepts. Can you explain what a data lake is? What it isn’t? Why you’d use one over a data warehouse?"

The uncomfortable truth? Many people can’t. But they’ll still slap AWS Certified or “AI Enthusiast” on their profiles because, hey, it looks impressive.

AI Can’t Save You From Shallow Thinking

We’re now in an era where people outsource their thinking to AI. Read that again.

The MIT article on cognitive debt nailed it: we’re reaching for ChatGPT before we even try to process problems ourselves. We aren't learning; we’re assembling Frankensteins made from Stack Overflow snippets and hallucinated LLM logic.

Every startup is now “AI-powered,” solving problems no one has. And every engineer is an “AI specialist” because they prompted GPT-4 once and deployed a Hugging Face model without knowing what a vector DB is.

Critical thinking has been replaced with critical prompting.

What You Can Actually Do to Not Be a Fraud

1. Admit What You Don’t Know
   Honesty in interviews is rare and powerful. If they ask if you’ve used Tool X, don’t lie. Say:
   “I haven’t used X directly, but I’ve worked with Y, which is similar in these ways…”
   You get bonus points for being transparent and adaptable.

2. Ask “Why?” More Than “How?”
   Don't just chase answers—chase understanding. Why is this architecture better? Why not this database? Why is this tradeoff acceptable?

3. Stop Worshiping Buzzwords
   Throwing around terms like “vector embeddings” and “AGI” doesn’t make you smart. It makes you insufferable—especially if you can’t explain them to a 12-year-old.

4. Create, Don’t Just Consume
   Build things. Not because someone on YouTube told you to clone Twitter, but because you're curious. Want to understand APIs? Build one. Want to learn React? Make a dumb to-do list—but really learn how the state flows.

A Note on Empathy

Look—I get it. Some folks are racing to break into tech because of visa issues, layoffs, or family responsibilities. Desperation doesn’t always leave room for depth. But understand this:

In the long run, cutting corners won’t help you. Especially when the layoffs come, and vibe coders are the first to go.

If you’re in this field, be in it for real. Know your tools. Know your tradeoffs. And for the love of all things technical—know your why.

In Conclusion: Tech Needs You to Think Again

Yes, the tech world is chaotic. Frameworks change. Job posts contradict each other. AI is both your enemy and your crutch. But here’s your anchor:

Focus on what you actually want to build. Build it. Break it. Ask questions. Stay curious. And maybe—just maybe—help us bring “why” back from the dead.

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I'm documenting my real-time journey through career pivots, awkward interviews, and the rough, rewarding moments of figuring it out. You'll get:

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~ Aishwarya