Thoughts on Vibe Coding — and What That Means for All of Us
If you’ve been anywhere near the tech press lately, you’ve probably heard the term “vibe coding.” My news feed is full of it. It’s one of those phrases that started as a joke but now seems to be everywhere. As someone who’s self-taught, and someone who now teach others how to code, I’ve been watching this trend with a mix of fascination and unease. What does it mean when anyone can build an app just by chatting to Cursor? How will this affect my job and the wider industry in general? Is this the death of ‘traditional’ software engineering — or just its next evolution? Do established companies even hire vibe coders? Questions… What Is Vibe Coding? Coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, “vibe coding” refers to the practice of using AI tools — like large language models (LLMs) — to generate code based on natural language prompts. Instead of writing code line by line, you describe what you want, and the AI builds it for you. Karpathy described it as “fully giving in to the vibes,” where you interact with the AI using voice or text, letting it handle the implementation details. But here’s the thing… Andrej Karpathy understands how code works. What causes my eyebrow to assume a slightly less than horizontal attitude is when I read statements like this: In vibe coding, the coder doesn’t need to understand how or why the code works and often accepts that a certain number of bugs and glitches will be present.
If you’ve been anywhere near the tech press lately, you’ve probably heard the term “vibe coding.” My news feed is full of it. It’s one of those phrases that started as a joke but now seems to be everywhere. As someone who’s self-taught, and someone who now teach others how to code, I’ve been watching this trend with a mix of fascination and unease. What does it mean when anyone can build an app just by chatting to Cursor? How will this affect my job and the wider industry in general? Is this the death of ‘traditional’ software engineering — or just its next evolution? Do established companies even hire vibe coders? Questions…
What Is Vibe Coding?
Coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, “vibe coding” refers to the practice of using AI tools — like large language models (LLMs) — to generate code based on natural language prompts. Instead of writing code line by line, you describe what you want, and the AI builds it for you. Karpathy described it as “fully giving in to the vibes,” where you interact with the AI using voice or text, letting it handle the implementation details.
But here’s the thing… Andrej Karpathy understands how code works. What causes my eyebrow to assume a slightly less than horizontal attitude is when I read statements like this:
In vibe coding, the coder doesn’t need to understand how or why the code works and often accepts that a certain number of bugs and glitches will be present.
