What skills transfer from vibe coding to real coding?

Vibe coding teaches you more 'real' development skills than you might expect:

Directly transferable skills:

Architecture thinking: Understanding how components connect, where data lives, how features interact. This is the hard part of development that vibe coding teaches.

Debugging: Finding and fixing problems, reading error messages, isolating issues. These skills are identical in traditional development.

Database concepts: Tables, relationships, queries, access control. Whether you write SQL or ask AI to, the mental model is the same.

API integration: Understanding requests and responses, authentication, working with external services.

Version control: If you're using GitHub with AI tools, you're learning git-the standard version control system.

What you'd still need to learn for traditional development:

Syntax: The actual words and symbols to write code. This is learnable but takes time.

Programming fundamentals: Variables, functions, loops, conditionals in depth.

Deep framework knowledge: Understanding React or Python at a level beyond 'it works'.

The transition path: Many vibe coders who want to go deeper start by editing AI-generated code rather than writing from scratch. You understand the patterns, you just need to learn the syntax. This is much easier than learning everything at once.