Sept. 18, 2026 | VIBE-CODING PT. 2
Although I personally believe everyone should learn coding basics (even in the age of AI), I begrudgingly admit that it is NOT essential for many HR and OD professionals.
What is essential is understanding the underlying statistical concepts. Either you or someone on your team must be able to validate the output of the vibe-coded analyses.
SOMEONE has to know…
- If the procedure was done correctly,
- If the results are correct,
- And even more fundamentally… What it means.
Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude can do incredible things, but they can also provide incorrect or irrelevant information (what we call “hallucinations,” although that’s a misnomer). We’ve already seen countless incidents where workers submitted or otherwise acted on AI output that turned out to be wrong, with disastrous consequences.
In these cases, the workers had no idea that the AI-generated output was incorrect—they didn’t understand the process, so they didn’t know how to verify the accuracy of the output.
And ironically that is what makes AI so alluring. It seems magical precisely because we don’t fully understand how it produces results.
But the fact that you don’t understand how AI works is NOT its value—that’s its liability.
In summary, Yes, you can rely on vibe-coding to bypass some or most of the mechanical aspects of data analysis.
But you cannot bypass statistical understanding, or else the results might as well be gibberish.
