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Vibe... coding... I'm getting old, what is this?



Throwing user stories at an LLM and hope it builds the right thing. It's like letting a product manager try to generate code without paying attention to the details. It's as terrible as it sounds, but debatably okay for fast prototypes.


A term coined by Andrej Karpathy.

"There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works."

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383


I think this is what they're referring to -- see this video:

https://www.tiktok.com/@rileybrown.ai/video/7473731306845768...


I lasted about 10 seconds of that video before I had to stop it as I was beginning to develop a very unhealthy urge to inflect violence on the presenter and his whiny overly performative voice.


Letting ai write most of the code (using cursor, windsurf, aider, or any similar solution).

You go back and forth with the ai (or let the agent mode and MCP interactions) figure out any build errors / exceptions and resolve them.




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