What Is Vibe Coding?

Is it here to stay?

Aditya Kumar Saroj
March 24, 2025

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Popular AI-Assisted Coding Tools

It all started with this.

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
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy)
11:17 PM • Feb 2, 2025

Computer scientist and popular internet personality, Andrej Karpathy coined a new term for AI-dependent coding - “vibe coding” - giving up the control to AI while coding.

AI assistants such as Cursor, Windsurf, etc. are becoming increasingly popular. These AI-powered tools are capable code generators and can translate user prompts into working code in almost any programming language.

This makes developing projects much faster even for people with beginner knowledge of coding.

The Good

In the indie hacking (individual project-making tech people) world, vibe coding has got a lot of hype after a super-successful project by one of the richest in the community, Pieter Levels.

Late in February, Pieter posted about how he’s vibe-coded a flight simulator game with almost no prior game development knowledge.

IT WORKS!!!!!
A FULL multiplayer with Python websockets server that receives and broadcasts all player positions every 100ms (10 times per second)
All code written almost 100% by AI with Cursor and Grok 3 wrote the server code
Now you can fly around with everyone else :D It'll
— @levelsio (@levelsio)
4:51 PM • Feb 25, 2025

Even Elon Musk reposted the game and things took off. Pieter now sells planes and creative ad spots in the game and is now making $87K/month. He already had a huge audience and it became easier for him to get concurrent players on a game that is fairly simple and doesn’t involve any complex graphics, storyline, or physics.

This has made vibe coding a movement. Pieter himself is organizing a Vibe Coding Game Jam where people use AI to create games and the best games get rewarded. Karpathy and famous game developer, Tim Soret, are among the judges.

Popular AI coding tool, Bolt, has taken vibe coding to the next level with the world’s largest hackathon with prizes totaling more than $1 million.

Vibe coding is here to stay. It is backed by investors putting money into AI-assistant companies which will keep improving their tools and keep organizing more events to encourage vibe coding further.

The Bad

The problem is many users ignore and will ignore some important words in Karpathy’s original post -

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.

Andrej Karpathy

Andrej is an elite coder. If something goes wrong in his vibe-coded application, he can debug it. It’ll take him some time to understand the code that he’d blindly been accepting for some time but he’ll eventually get there.

If you’re an inexperienced coder and try what I like to call - “vibe debugging,” you are going to have an extremely hard time.

If you are not a coder, you can still try vibe coding and get good results in the beginning but once the AI tools start losing context and start injecting unintentional buggy code, your application is doomed.

What can be even worse in the future is when the vibe coding movement gains pace and interns with production access at big tech companies start introducing vibe-coded security vulnerabilities into widely used applications.

Imagine a situation where you lose all the money from your bank account because an intern logged your net banking password in plaintext in the browser.

With the age of vibe coding, the golden age for bug bounties and hacking might also arrive.

My Conclusion

Pure vibe coding must be restricted to fun projects that do not have any scope of leaking sensitive information like credit card numbers or addresses.

To be a vibe coder, you must first be a coder. You can vibe code without learning coding but then it is at your own and your users’ risk.

AI-assisted coding is here to stay. I use it actively too. It is the coder’s responsibility to understand the code that they are implementing.

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