The Joy of "Vibe Coding"

Since Andrey Karpathy coined the term Vibe Coding in February 2025, it has taken the world by storm. According to Wikipedia, “Vibe coding (also vibecoding) is an AI-dependent programming technique where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for coding.”

I have been using AI for coding for more than a year, but the rush of social media attention revived my curiosity, especially the competition started by Pieter Levels.

“Vibe Coding” brought back the joy of programming for me. I was tired of solving the same old problems with a different UI, and it became old. With vibe coding, I don’t really have to solve the little problems; instead, I can concentrate on the larger picture. I don't have to spend time on things like off-by-one logic, looping, and simple data retrieval. It also provided a great start for a UI-challenged person like me because it reveals something I never thought about.

It might be tempting to say that vibe coding can turn non-programmers into software builders. For simple, straightforward applications, that may be true, but as soon as some complexity is introduced, understanding what the LLM actually wrote becomes crucial. Also, you must be very explicit about code organization since that can help you navigate various parts of your application. It is not all sunshine and rainbows; sometimes it is hard to describe what you want. For a programmer, it may be easier to write the code than to write the English of what you want it to do. Someone rightly said you must think like a product manager when making an app using vibe coding. However, you still need to understand the framework you are building your app on, what APIs are, what secrets mean, how to run your app, how to deploy, etc.

All the LLM makers market this for non-programmers, but it’s the programmers who will actually make a killing on this. Sure, a non-programmer can start and become good at it, but they won’t beat a programmer right out of the box.

Indie developers will have a field day, cranking out app after app. However, an enterprise application must be secure, maintainable, and scalable. All this comes with experience, not strictly vibe coding. Enterprises will still rely on proven engineers to build their products. They are now 10x more productive.