Will the future of software development run on vibes coding?

Vibe coding, sometimes spelled vibecoding, is an AI-powered programming practice where you surrender to the "vibes" and power of the AI, while ignoring the details of the generated code.

Intro

AI tools like ChatGPT can translate English descriptions into working code, enabling programming without understanding the underlying code mechanics.

Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy recently gave this practice a name—"vibe coding"—and it's gaining traction in tech circles.

The technique, enabled by large language models (LLMs) from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, has attracted attention for potentially lowering the barrier to entry for software creation.

AI tools like Cursor Composer and GitHub Copilot make coding accessible to non-programmers, but reliability for real-world applications remains uncertain.

On February 2, Karpathy introduced the term in a post on X, writing, "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."

While vibe coding, if an error occurs, you feed it back into the AI model, accept the changes, hope it works, and repeat the process.

To know exactly how many people are currently vibe coding, Cursor had 40,000 paying users in August 2024, and GitHub reported 1.3 million Copilot users in February 2024, showing widespread adoption of AI coding tools.