What is vibe coding, should you be using AI to do it, and does it matter?

Want to write software, but haven’t got the first clue where to start? Enter “vibe coding”, a term that has swept the internet to describe the use of AI tools, including large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, to generate computer code even if you can’t program.

What is vibe coding and where did it come from?

“Vibe coding basically refers to using generative AI not just to assist with coding, but to generate the entire code for an app,” says Noah Giansiracusa at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Users ask, or prompt, LLM-based models such as ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot to produce the code for an app or service, and the AI system does all the work.

The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a skilled software engineer who was head of AI at Tesla and a founding engineer at OpenAI – the maker of ChatGPT. In February, he posted on X about a “new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding’”.

Karpathy described it as “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists”. The term was born and the idea took hold. “That captured a moment that resonated with so many people, because there’s a whole bunch of people who are non-programmers who are starting to play with LLMs, writing code and getting amazing results out of them,” says Simon Willison, a software developer.

What is the point of vibe coding?

Software engineering can be a tricky thing to learn – and as a result, many people don’t bother. Vibe coding can help people with ideas for tools, apps and services to make them a reality without the challenge of learning the specifics of a programming language.

“On the one hand it’s a gamechanger, because a lot of people are vibe coding, and over the course of a few prompting cycles you can get something that’s amazing and something that – for people who can’t program – it’s better than anything they could do on their own,” says Matt Wood at Northumbria University, UK. But it can also result in incomplete, error-strewn software, he adds.

So is vibe coding a good thing or a bad thing?

Opinion is split. “You’ve got all these people on LinkedIn and Twitter making outrageous claims that nobody needs to learn to program anymore,” says Willison, who believes that is overstating the power of vibe coding.

“My sense is that this is a promising direction that will get a lot better and that we’ll see a lot more of in the near future, but at present it’s a bit limited and has some reliability issues,” says Giansiracusa. The code produced can often be buggy, and because the people prompting it don’t have the inherent knowledge to fix it, they are overly reliant on the same LLMs that made the errors to fix them.

Will vibe coding change software engineering?

One of the big claims about AI is its ability to take our jobs. But there is little evidence that vibe coding will replace software engineers – despite some social media boasts. “It’s not going to replace programmers,” says Wood.

“I feel like the job of a software engineer is to produce software that works,” says Willison. “One of the reasons I don’t think we’re going to be put out of our jobs by these systems is actually, a huge amount of the work that we do with software engineers has nothing to do with typing the code.”