02 Apr 2025

Some (genuine) thoughts on vibe coding

Filed under: tech | the Internet | AI

Vibe coding. It’s a phrase that started out as a way to describe a form of coding without thought, per Andrej Karpathy’s original tweet, which I’ll quote here:

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. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it. I “Accept All” always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I’d have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

It might sound daunting to some and maybe even a little dangerous. You’re laughing? You’re trusting a large language model to code and debug and you’re laughing? Then Simon Willson write about what vibe coding is and isn’t and a subsequent Bluesky thread on his frustration at the term losing its intended meaning:

Feels like I’m losing the battle on this one, I keep seeing people use “vibe coding” to mean any time an LLM is used to write code

I’m particularly frustrated because for a few glorious moments we had the chance at having ONE piece of AI-related terminology with a clear, widely accepted definition!

I thought it was perhaps naive to think that a phrase or concept related to AI in these times would stay worthwhile and not get misinterpreted. After all, that’s what LLMs themselves inherently do, right? I also felt like using the word “vibe” was like a backdoor for it as well. It was only a matter of time before it lost its way IMO.

Is vibe coding even new?

The reason why I started writing this is because I’ve seen a few examples of “vibe coding” from people in the tech industry that I respect, notably Vincent Warmerdam. He has dug a bit deeper into it beyond coding and leaving, with mini projects such as this Santorini game made with CSS transitions. His suggestion is to “study the vibes” and learn new things from what the LLMs propose in their code. And that got me thinking: isn’t that how we learnt code when we were teenagers?

I never got into the whole MySpace coding thing but I know plenty of my peers did and it was their gateway into HTML and CSS. If we wanna talk about vibes, they were very high back then. The customisations were only limited to the creator’s imagination (and the specs in the mid-2000s of course). People were coding stuff and making it work, whether it was a bit hacky or not reproducible (looking at you, !important)

Now, vibe coding refers to LLM coding more specifically where you don’t care as much about the output but perhaps its been repackaged from the past. How many of us were blindly copying code from other peoples’ sites and putting them in our own? Did it work properly? Would they find out? Would I get caught? Who cares, it works well enough! And, let’s face it, LLMs are doing the same thing but in a more “sophisticated” way (not gonna talk about that here so discuss that amongst yourselves).

When I was learning how to code HTML and CSS, I didn’t look up much if any documentation. There was no YouTube and I rarely had internet access. Just FrontPage Express and hopes and dreams. Having a WYSIWYG editor meant I didn’t need to care about HTML or CSS code. The vibe was what I wanted out of my site, picking colours and fonts and using tables for layouts. Was I vibe coding back then? Was FrontPage Express taking care of the hard stuff so I didn’t have to?

What’s in a name?

First, it was “prompt engineering” and now “vibe coding”. Terms I’ve felt a little icky using but they’re short and quippy and I guess explain what I’m doing, kinda? Prompt engineering still feels like hopping on one leg while asking the LLM to code what you want, thinking it’s the hopping that really made it work. And vibe coding feels like a slight rehash of what we used to do with less accessibility to information, slower internet speeds, and a desire to make cool things using the tools we had.

And none of this is to discredit anyone I’ve mentioned (although I worry that I have so apologies!). But I always think with the increased proliferation of these tools and ideologies that people can get swept up by them and not see history repeating itself or look for easier alternatives. Anything we create and share is immediately up for scrutiny or completely ignored in a sea of other projects, and that includes new buzzwords and the projects that come out of them. Hell, I’m scrutinising right now! At this point, whatever we create, we have to be prepared to set free and pick and choose what we claw back before nefarious people get their hands on it.

Sadly with vibe coding, it might have started out as a tongue-in-cheek thing, and almost throwaway but now it has taken on a life of its own and we’re halfway between taking it seriously and poking fun. I’m not sure which side I stand on but my legs keep widening and I just remembered that I can’t do the splits!

Related: I just found this article called There is no Vibe Engineering:

The key difference between vibe coding and normal coding is that the engineer doesn’t interact with the codebase directly, and instead converses with the agent and inspects the final outcome.

That ties in with my FrontPage Express anecdote. I didn’t interact with the codebase at all, just the editor (albeit with manual inputs so not exactly the same)