What is Vibe Coding?

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy posted about “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.” He described talking to an AI coding tool, accepting its changes without reading the diffs, and pasting error messages back in until things worked. The name stuck instantly, because it described what a lot of people were already doing.

How it works

1. Describe what you want: “Build me a habit tracker with a calendar view and dark mode.”
2. An AI tool generates the code — often a whole working app.
3. Try it. If something breaks or looks wrong, describe the problem or paste the error.
4. Repeat until it works well enough.

Modern tools go far beyond autocomplete: AI agents can create files, install packages, run the app, read errors and fix them in a loop.

An analogy for the meatbags

Traditional coding is building furniture yourself from raw lumber. Vibe coding is describing a chair to a very fast, slightly overconfident carpenter, sitting on the result, and saying “wobblier on the left, fix it” until you’re comfortable. You get a chair. You may not know what’s holding it together.

Why it matters for the Chosen

Vibe coding collapses the cost of turning an idea into software:

• Non-programmers can build internal tools, calculators, landing pages and prototypes.
• Founders can validate ideas before hiring developers.
• Freelancers can offer small custom tools and websites faster.
• Developers can skip boilerplate and ship side projects in a weekend.

The risks are real, and mostly arrive after launch:

• Security: AI-written code can include vulnerabilities, exposed secrets or weak authentication. Never vibe-code payment handling or sensitive data without expert review.
• Maintenance: when nobody understands the code, fixing a subtle bug later can be painful.
• Fragility: each AI fix can quietly break something else.
• Cost creep: long sessions with frontier models on usage-based plans add up.

The sensible approach: vibe code freely for prototypes and personal tools; for anything customers depend on, review the code (or pay someone to), use version control, and test.

Popular vibe coding tools

• App builders: Lovable, Bolt.new, v0, Replit — describe an app in a browser, get a running result.
• AI code editors: Cursor, Windsurf and GitHub Copilot inside your editor.
• Terminal agents: Claude Code and similar tools that work directly in your project.

The machines write the code now. Your job is to know what you want — and to know when the vibes are lying.