> "Vibe coding," coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February, describes giving AI prompts to write code. As Karpathy puts it, developers can "fully give in to the vibes" and "forget the code even exists."
To be fair, Karpathy coined the term specifically for a playful, just-for-fun, quarter-serious approach to software development where you just tell the machine what you want and then be open for surprises. Assisted coding is not vibe coding in that sense.
We use the term as an ironic and silly thing here in the UK, at least amongst my friends, also somewhat in the pejorative. People who have no concept of what they are doing are a joke.
I have a Vibecoding sticker in the SUPREME style on my work laptop, which I think accurately summarises my opinion towards it.
Yeah - being open to surprises (code has tons of broken corner cases, security vulnerabilities, missing error handling, etc, etc) isn't exactly what comes to mind when writing real software.
I'm not even sure in what use cases, even toy ones, vibe coding works. It's been a few months since I tried using Claude to even do simple things like generate a React-based prototype for part of a web page (the sort of use case I would expect it to do well on), and even there it wasn't a "haha isn't this cool" hands-off "vibe coding" experience - I had to intervene and to do my own google research to find out why it was failing and then tell it explicity what to do.
I also have to wonder how many of these AI researchers fully realize the massive gap in complexity between what they are writing (typical ML model or prototype) and what real software development looks like. Let's see Karpathy "vibe code" a 100L-1M LOC system that needs to interact with a dozen undocumented legacy systems via proprietary interfaces, then come back and tell us how that went.
To be fair, Karpathy coined the term specifically for a playful, just-for-fun, quarter-serious approach to software development where you just tell the machine what you want and then be open for surprises. Assisted coding is not vibe coding in that sense.