What Is Vibe Coding? And Why Should You Care?

ISTANBUL, TURKEY - MAY 06: A woman views historical documents and photographs displayed in a high ... More tech art installation at Salt Galata on May 6, 2017 in Istanbul, Turkey. The "Archive Dreaming" installation by artist Refik Anadol uses artificial intelligence to visualize nearly 2 million historical Ottoman documents and photographs from the SALT Research Archive. Controlled by a single tablet in the center of a mirrored room the artist used machine learning algorithms to combine historical documents, art, graphics and photographs to create an immersive installation allowing people to scroll, read and explore the archives. The SALT Galata archives include around 1.7 million documents ranging from the late-Ottoman era to the present day. The exhibition is on show at SALT Galata art space through till June 11, 2017. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
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AI is fundamentally changing how software is built. Gone are the days of facing an empty editor, writing each line of code individually. While AI copilots are now common, with many powerful tools providing such functionality, and models like ChatGPT providing increasingly capable code, what is next? Enter Vibe Coding.
AI has had a fundamental impact on coding - simply by being able to write code from a text prompt. Prior to AI, code generation tools were largely structured and domain-specific. For example - in AI itself, one could specify a sequence of operations and have AI string together the prewritten modules that execute the sequence, adding appropriate configurations and links. Now, with just a text question, AIs like ChatGPT can select appropriate open-source modules, figure out how to link them together and present you with ready-to-run code and detailed explanations. The functionality of the code is also improving with every new release of these AIs.
This ability (now also present in coding tools as a copilot function) has downstream implications for coding skills, education, and software development practices, generating such trends as prompt-driven programming, and N-of-1 Programming.
Vibe coding, a term coined by Andrej Karpathy, drives this trend further. In particular - Vibe Coding focuses on the “vibe” of the software, rather than the code. The concept of using English (written or spoken) as a way to specify what code needs to be written remains, but the focus is now shifted to the overall product being created, and the role of the human in designing and guiding that through a series of conceptual directions to an AI, which result in the AI iteratively refining, fixing and adding functionality to the code. An important shift, as noted in Andrej Karpathy’s original message on X, is that humans may not even read these code versions - but rather assess them by their behavior on tests run by the AI at the human’s behest. The observation also notes that the code can grow beyond the human’s comprehension very quickly.
Here is the process I used to generate a simulator for a chemical reaction. I had a week’s worth of experimental data on a chemical process. I also knew the name of the chemical process that occurred. I provided this information to an AI. It was able to find the correct mathematical equations to describe the process and use those equations to build a simulator in Python.