Isn't that the point of vibe coding? You don't even look at the code. Just trust the llm to take the wheel. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

Would be great comedic relief for sure since I’m mostly working in the backend mines, where the LLM-friendly boilerplate is harder to come by admittedly. My defense is that Karpathy does the same thing, admitted himself in a tweet x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… - I know exactly what he means by this.

You mean Karpathy's post discussed on twitter.com/karpathy/status/18861921848… ? If so, I quite enjoyed that as a way of considering how LLM-driven exploratory coding has now become feasible. It's not quite there yet, but we're getting closer to a non-technical user being able to create a POC on their own, which would then be a much better point for them in engaging an engineer. And it will only get better from here.

I've been watching several "vibe coding" vids on the youtubes. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… Some of them are painful. Some are impressive. The projects are small. Sometimes pulling in powerful off-the-shelf modules. They are getting better fast. As a greybeard software architect, my current annoyance is that I'm spending all day talking to people when I want to get some practice voice prompting code :P

I like the original construction of “Vibe Coding” [0] that I will attempt to make concise: Vibe Coding is an RECREATIONAL activity where a user and an AI collaborate on creation of some artifact AND the user accepts ALL feedback and suggestions from the AI. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

It was coined by Andrej Karpathy two months ago, which is partly why it spread like wildfire. Karpathy is far from some random grifter or memer. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… >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.

I think docs.cursor.com/chat/agent has shown plain English is precise enough to program a computer with, and some well respected programmers have become fans of it x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… I only took exception to the original statement - that coding is trivial, and the questioning if AI is even useful. So many people are finally able to create things they were never able to. That's something to celebrate. Coding isn't trivial to most people, it's more of an insurmountable barrier to entry. English works - that's why a clear-minded project manager can delegate programming to someone fluent in it, without knowing how to code themselves. We don't end up with them dumping a jar of jam on the floor, because intelligent beings can communicate in the context of a lot of prior knowledge they were trained on. That's how AI is overcoming the peanut butter and jelly problem of English. It doesn't need solutions defined for it, a word to the wise is sufficient.

You’re right. It’s explicitly about not caring about the code: > 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. — x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

My biggest pet peeve with the phrase "vibe coding" is that no one (including OP, apparently, sorry OP) seems to be aware of where the phrase came from. This tweet from Andrej Karpathy[1] coined the term and provides a good definition (with a few snips for brevity): > 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. ... I "Accept All" always ... 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. ... but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works. It's not that hard to understand that this is a distinct thing from "AI-assisted" development. It's a distinct thing that can be fun and no serious person thinks it should be your only modality for getting real work done. If you've got an AI-aided workflow and uninformed people are dismissing what you're doing as "vibe coding" just... idk, ignore them? My opinion is that anyone who hasn't at least tried this stuff and taken the time to understand how it could be useful to them is just not worth listening to. [1]: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

Exactly. I'm arguing that what we should be focused on at this relatively early stage is not the amount of output but the rate of innovation. It's important to note that we're now arguing about the level of quality of something that was a "ha, ha, interesting" in a sidenote by Andrej Karpathy 10 years ago [0], and then became a "ha, ha, useful for weekend projects" in his tweet from a year ago. I'm looking forward to reading what he'll be saying in the next few years. [0] karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effec… [1] x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

People definitely are doing that. Anyone who is not a programmer and asks the LLM to write a program is doing exactly that. The LLM will do that itself behind the scenes nowadays (yesterday Claude wrote a Python program when I simply asked it to give me the document it wrote in Word format!). References: This is the original definition ("forget that the code even exists"). [0] Simon Willison wrote a much longer version of my comment. [1] He also suggested the term "vibe engineering" for the case where you are reviewing the LLM output. [2] [0] x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… [1] simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-codi… [2] simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engin…

This is the "og definition" of vibe coding x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… He knows how to code, as such your personal definition does not agree with how the term was coined. Now, 1 year later and people interpret a lot into the term. in that context I could accept your perspective to that term, but it's certainly not the original meaning

Karpathy coined the term vibecoding 11 months ago (x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…). It caused quite a stir - because not only was it was a radically new concept, but fully agentic coding had only become recently possible. You've been vibe coding for two years??

The original use of the word "vibe code" was very clear. You don't even look at the diffs. You just yolo the code. x.com/i/status/1886192184808149383

Vibe coding was coined less than a year ago: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

But "vibe-coded" doesn't mean "unreviewed." (Just FYI, that’s literally what it means. The term was coined here: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… . Excerpt: “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.”)

Your Karpathy quote there is out of context. It starts with: twitter.com/karpathy/status/18861921848… 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. Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding. If you're paying attention to the code that's being produced you can guide it towards being just as high quality (or even higher quality) than code you would have written by hand.

vibe coding implies a complete lack of process. The definition is basically YOLO.... x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

Definitely. The original vibe coding tweet is pretty explicit about “forgetting the code exists”, and “throwaway weekend projects” (x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…) Now however, many people just use it to mean any ai-assisted coding. One person says “vibe coding” to mean a throwaway script to scrape some page. Others use it to mean a code reviewed app built by a team using Claude. It is so broad as to be meaningless at this point

> I suspect it's less of an undertaking than you may think... having an existing codebase you can reference prevents a lot of the problems you have with vibecoding. That's because it's not vibe coding - stingraycharles doesn't seem to understand what vibe coding is. Vibe coding was defined here x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… > 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. This is very far from Anthropic's migration plans.

The definition is at x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… and no that does not match what is in the branch. Systemically migrating a code base using an LLM does not match the defintion of vibe coding. There's a decent article by Simon Willison that talks about this: simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-codi… > I’m seeing people apply the term “vibe coding” to all forms of code written with the assistance of AI. I think that both dilutes the term and gives a false impression of what’s possible with responsible AI-assisted programming.

Not at all. Andrej Karpathy coined vibe coding as: twitter.com/karpathy/status/18861921848… > where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists [...] 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. So clearly we need a term for what happens when experienced, professional software engineers use LLM tooling as part of a responsible development process, taking full advantage of their existing expertise and with a goal to produce good, reliable software. "Agentic engineering" is a good candidate for that.

This is you: >> I think all coding will become vibe coding... Nope. First of all, Let's get the true definition of "vibe coding" completely clear from the first mention of it from Karpathy. From [0]: >> "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." [0] >> "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." [0] So with the true definition, you are arguing that all coding will become "vibe-coding" and that includes in mission critical software. Not even Karpathy would go as far as that and he's not even sure that he even knows that it works..."mostly". Responsibility is what cannot be vibe-coded. The major cloud providers and the tech companies that own them have contracts with their customers which is worth billions to their revenue. That is why they cannot afford to "vibe-code" infra that causes them to lose $100M+ a hour when a key part of their infra goes down or stops working. So: > Like, Claude Code as we all know is clearly vibe-coded and is already a 10-billion (and rapidly increasing!) dollar system. That is not vibe-coded anymore and it is maintained by software engineers who look at the code at all times, daily before merging any changes; AI generated or not. > Google Search and various Meta apps meet those criteria and people are already using LLMs on that code, and will soon be "vibe coding" as I described it. Nope. As Karpathy described it, that would never happen and human software engineers will be reviewing the agents code all the times. But that would not be vibe-coding would it? > AWS meets that criteria and has already had an LLM-caused outage! Are they vibe coding now after that outage? I bet that they are not. > After all, all the cloud providers have been having outages long before the age of LLMs. That isn't the point. Someone was held to account for the outages and had to explain why it happened. They will lose trust + billions of dollars if they admitted that they vibe-coded their entire infra and had 0 engineers who don't understand why it went wrong. > The thing most people are missing is that code is cheap, and so automated validations are cheap, and you get more bang for the buck by throwing more code in the form of extensive tests and validations at it than human attention. The risk is amplified with the companies reputation on the line and it's very expensive to lose. I'm talking in the hundreds of billions annually and a 10% loss of global revenues due to constant outages can cause the stock to fall. So you do understand the contradiction you said earlier about AWS indeed strengthens my point on the limitations on vibe coding especially on mission critical software? [0] x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

> 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. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… Forgetting code exists is by definition not suitable for serious work. However, OP said in the following paragraph, that this would be a first draft, and that the code would actually be reviewed and tested properly before being integrated. At which point it is by definition no longer vibe coding, because you do care about the code! It's just an AI assisted workflow, but now we call all of those vibe coding for some reason. (Naming things is hard!) If vibe coding means not caring about the code, then a literal translation of the term would be "not caring about coding" coding.

Vibe coding indeed originally meant "give in to the vibes [...] and forget that the code even exists." x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… In the case of this specific port, the port was done so fast that it is clear humans did not verify the soundness of the translation. It is not clear whether this manual verification will ever occur. That being said, most software projects were already doing "vibe coding" by Dijkstra's standards long before AI showed up. Going on vibes and forgetting that correctness even exists ;) Guaranteeing the correctness of complex code is difficult, but it will increasingly become non-optional as we now have a billion hackers in a data center. --- Edit: "Bun's unreleased Rust port has 13,365 unsafe blocks" news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48239790

The term vibe coding actually originated from a tweet from Andrej Karpathy and so there is actually a sort of definition of the term. He said vibe coding is where you "forget the code exists": x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… So if you "read the diff" it isn't vibe coding, at least not by Karpathy's definition. Obviously it's not a "rule" and you can still call it vibe coding if you want to. Maybe the meaning of the term has evolved since his tweet anyway.

No, I read what you wrote, and you wrote "vibecoded", and the definition of vibe coding is not reading what you generated, then always hitting "Accept All". And it has a space in it. I'll quote the definition below, so you don't have to look it up yourself, and we can both be on the same page. It's right there on the label. If you didn't mean "vibe coded" then don't vibe write "vibecoded", and instead read what you wrote, then look up the meaning and spelling of the terms you are using, and do not neglect to correct yourself because it's not what you meant. I have to correct typos like that all the time when I write them by hand. But making typos and having to correct them and having to look up the meaning and spelling of words does not make me complain about all human generated code and text just because it requires me to proofread what I wrote. Reading what you wrote or what ai generated and looking up terms is all part of the process, because people and llms make mistakes. Vibe coding is not giving a shit about that, thinking it doesn't apply to you, and hitting "Accept All" without reading the code, by definition. And if you can't accept that, then don't write or generate code or text, and don't complain about how you have to read what you and llms generate and correct it, and understand what words mean. >I had to literally vibecode a separate linter for this Why would you "literally vibecode" a linter and use it to review other llm generated code without reading the linter's code itself? That is "literally" vibe coding eating its own tail. I take your emphatic use of the word "literally" to mean that you are "literally" using the well know definition of vibe coding as it was coined by Andrej Karpathy of OpenAI, which is "iterally" (and I quote): >I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. Am I misunderstanding you, or are you vibe writing the wrong term without reviewing the meaning of your own words? Here is the full literal quote so there is no room for confusion or claims of missing context: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… >Andrej Karpathy @karpathy: 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. That is the "literal" widely understood and well defined meaning of what you wrote, but misspelled "vibecoding", according to the well known AI expert from OpenAI who originally defined and championed the term. Its meaning has not suddenly changed. Only a vibe coder would vibe code a linter to vibe lint vibe coded code for them, without looking at ANY of that code themselves, by just hitting "Accept All" always. Because vibe coders by definition don't want to bother reading what they generated, don't care what it means, and still expect it to come out perfect. Don't be a vibe coder, or a vibe writer, or a human stochastic parrot: read what you write and know the definitions of the words you use. And if you're not a vibe coder, then don't claim to "vibecode": that's "not engineering" just "magical and wishful thinking", as you like to say. >"I always have to correct its hallucinations during the day. Why would I ever let it run unsupervised overnight?" And the answer to your question is: because you are using git, so you can look at the diffs before merging and deploying into production. You are using git and looking at the diffs, aren't you? Have you heard of PRs and code reviews? Or is that too much to ask of a "vibecoder"?

No, you said you were "literally vibecoding", which means the opposite of what he said. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

Which he calls "vibe coding". Link for the curious: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

Can you just make a blog post on this explaining your thesis in detail? It's hard for me not to see non-technical "vibe coding" [0] sidelining everyone in the industry except for the most senior of senior devs/PMs. [0] x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… I guess I can learn to code by throwing stuff at it from copy-paste, confabulations, and just trying random changes. Until it more-or-less works. Sure, it's throwaway crap, but what isn't these days? "Enshittify all the things"! Doesn't sound like much fun, though. Rather try Software Craftmanship.

It's a silly term "coined" by Adrej Karpathy: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… "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."

Here's where it all started: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

A term coined by Andrej Karpathy. "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." x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

I was surprised when I learned the source.. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

See twitter.com/karpathy/status/18861921848… for when it was coined by Andrei Karpathy. I've written more about it here: simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-codi… and here: simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/23/semantic…

I think this is where it originated from: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

That's not vibe coding though. Vibe coding is specifically pretending code doesn't exist, and just directing an LLM to do stuff... x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

> vibe coding was not made up Here’s the tweet that literally made up vibe coding: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… One might say blindly following hype is silly and cope too. I’ve seen no indication that relying entirely on AI can produce quality software. It can produce prototype quality code, just as it has since gpt-3.5. Advantages of technology is never considered. Security concerns are often missed. And, from what I’ve seen, the codebases are bloated. For your avg crud app, much of that doesn’t matter. It starts mattering when you start having real business constraints, like server budgets or data compliance. If you don’t see that, then you don’t have enough real world experience yet. That’s all. Remember how crypto was going to change everything? Or the metaverse? We live in a period of extreme technological hype backed by insane company valuations. Don’t get too fooled by market. These tools are useful. They are here to stay. And they do not replace the entire field of programming nor the work that programmers do.

Has the definition of vibe coding changed since Karpathy coined it? x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

So what have we redefined vibe coding to mean exactly? The original tweet[1] talked very specifically about not caring about quality, just accepting whatever code the AI produces blindly, as long as you get the black box output you're looking for, and just randomly try again if you didn't. Are people now using this term to mean "giving an AI agent broad tasks"? [1] x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

Where did Andrej say it was "the future of software engineering"? He very clearly described vibe coding as an entertaining way to hack on throwaway weekend projects. Try reading the whole tweet! twitter.com/karpathy/status/18861921848… "Would you yourself want vibe-coded software that is in highly critical systems such as in aeroplanes, hospitals, or in energy infrastructure?" Of course not. That's why I wrote simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-codi…... To save you the click: > The job of a software developer is not (just) to churn out code and features. We need to create code that demonstrably works, and can be understood by other humans (and machines), and that will support continued development in the future. > We need to consider performance, accessibility, security, maintainability, cost efficiency. Software engineering is all about trade-offs—our job is to pick from dozens of potential solutions by balancing all manner of requirements, both explicit and implied. > We also need to read the code. My golden rule for production-quality AI-assisted programming is that I won’t commit any code to my repository if I couldn’t explain exactly what it does to somebody else. > If an LLM wrote the code for you, and you then reviewed it, tested it thoroughly and made sure you could explain how it works to someone else that’s not vibe coding, it’s software development. The usage of an LLM to support that activity is immaterial.

> We've already started attacking the future by mocking it as "vibe coding". The term ‘vibe coding’ was coined by OpenAI’s co-founder. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

This seems to be where all this vibe coding thing started: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

Vibe coding is heavily using AI, but heavily using AI is not necessarily vibe coding. Vibe coding is when you disregard the code altogether and build something throwaway for fun that you don’t care about maintaining: > 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 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. — x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

Others already linked the original vibe coding tweet x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… To me, vibe coding means you don't get bogged down by the code, you just say your requirements and complain about end result until it works. Heavily using AI, in comparison could mean 1. ask for small code snippets, 2. ask it to explain concepts, 3. ask which APIs to use and how, 4. ask it to rephrase your strings, ..., but you still "care" about the code and understand what's going on.

Karpathy's original tweet defining "vibe coding": x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

Here's that Google search: google.com/search?q=intext%3A%22vibe+co…... The first result I got was this one vibecoding.vercel.app/ - which is shown as being from 2023... but that's fake. Read the page and it starts by saying: > On November 30, 2023, Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibecoding" And then includes a screenshot of Andrej's tweet - this one: twitter.com/karpathy/status/18861921848… But that tweet is dated 2nd February 2025. The Vercel-hosted site is lying about the date. I don't think Google's "before" filter actually works. It looks to me like blog spammers have figured this out and now habitually back-date their posts to a date well before they were written.

Almost, but not quite. As per Karpathy's definition [0], it's not about not knowing to code (he obviously does), but rather not caring - "fully give in to the vibes" and "forget that the code even exists". So the closest implementation to this ideal would probably be something like lovable.dev, that fully hides the code from you, because if you can't resist the need to look at the code, you're not fully "vibing". [0] x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

The author's description of vibe coding seems to have confused it with getting into a flow state in a vaguely AI-adjacent way. Vibe coding as originally coined by Karpathy [0] can't pay the bills because it would be wildly irresponsible for a professional to do—it's the kind of no-checks minimal-validation AI usage that gets lawyers into trouble for submitting legal documents with hallucinated court cases, just translated to coding instead of law. What the author is proposing isn't really "vibe" anything, it's just dedicating a small amount of time to fixing tech debt in a way that happens to involve an LLM as an assistant. The LLM in this model is honestly mostly superfluous. Don't get me wrong, this absolutely is how LLMs should be used in a professional setting, but I just question why we needed a name and a blog post for it. This is just responsible code maintenance as it's always been. [0] x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

> I’ve never used Go or Clickhouse before > I have no concept of Go or Clickhouse best practices. > One morning, I decide to actually inspect closely what’s all this code that Cursor has been writing. It’s not like I was blindly prompting without looking at the end result, but I was optimizing for speed and I hadn’t actually sat down just to review the code. > I’m defaulting to coding the first draft of that function on my own. I feel like he’s learnt the wrong lesson from this. There is a vast gulf between letting an LLM loose without oversight in a language you don’t know and starting from scratch yourself. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having AI do the first draft. But it actually has to be a first draft, not something you blindly commit without review. > “Vibe coding”, or whatever “coding with AI without knowing how to code” is called, is as of today a recipe for disaster, if you’re building anything that’s not a quick prototype. But that’s what vibe coding is. It’s explicitly about quick throwaway prototypes. If you care about the code, you are not vibe coding. > 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 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. — x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… He’s basically saying that vibe coding is a disaster after his experience doing something that is not vibe coding.

I'm mostly going by what he said: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… He seems to think it barely involves coding ("I don't read the diffs anymore, I Accept All [...] It's not really coding"), and that it's only good for goofing and throwaway code...

This is the origin of vibe coding: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… > 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. (...) 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. (...) Pair programming still very much deals with code and decisions.

The Karpathy tweet came out 2025-02-02. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

> Yet I have to say that if you are correct, the term is no different than eating tide pods or dry swallowing cinnamon. Why tf would anyone impose such an absurd artificial constraint on themselves, on the tool, or on whatever they are trying to build? Good faith question, I promise. IDK! I don't think Vibe Coding, with the definition that I understand, is a good idea. But the term comes from here: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… And the key parts are: > "forget that the code even exists" > "I don't read the diffs anymore" I myself am unclear on what the "vibes" that one is giving into actually are. But terms should have meanings and my understanding from reading the original tweet is that "Vibe Coding" means something distinct from "coding using some AI to help".

Here's the full original definition from Karpathy:[*]: > 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. Some of the key points here being "forget that the code even exists," "'Accept All' always," "don't read the diffs," and "The code grows beyond my usual comprehension." Doing software engineering using AI assistance is not vibe coding, by Karpathy's definition. [*] x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

Because of this tweet twitter.com/karpathy/status/18861921848…

> "Thoroughly review and understand the generated code" That isn't vibe coding though. Vibe coding means you don't look at the code, you look at the front / back end and accept what you see if it meets your expectations visually, and the code doesn't matter in this case, you "see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works." [1] If the changes are good enough, i.e. the front/backend works well, then it's good and keep prompting. You rely on and give in into the ~vibes~. [1] [1] x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

It still amuses me how literally people took Kapathy's famous tweet around vibe coding x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… If people were to actually read beyond the first sentence, it would become clear very quickly that this was meant to be tongue in cheek.

I'm not sure.. I kind of remembered it that way too, although perhaps not so much as a joke but just a throwaway tweet of what he was up so - experimenting with AI and having fun. However, I just searched up his tweet, and now I'm not so sure - he seemed to be advocating it as a new way of coding. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

Karpathy's, the person who is credited for inventing the term. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…

> AI moves so fast that Vibe Coding still has a negative stigma attached to it As it should, it's about writing code on vibes, not looking at the code, it's literally the definition of the term: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… And when I say literally I'm including dictionaries: blog.collinsdictionary.com/language-lov…...

"Ignoring the code entirely and only prompting" is the only definition of vibe-coding I'm aware of. It's from a Karpathy tweet (x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…): > 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... 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. It specifically doesn't mean "using an LLM as a code assistant". It definitely doesn't mean asking the LLM questions about code which you'll then use to write your own code. Those are LLM-assisted activities, and it's totally fine if you're using the LLM that way. But it's not what the term "vibe coding" means. "Vibe coding" is giving up on any pretense that you're in control, and letting the LLM take the wheel. It's fun for getting quick projects done, but it's also now becoming a distressingly common practice for people who literally do not know how to program in order to get a "product" to market.

Pretty sure Karpathy coined the term here: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… Imo, if you read the code, it's no longer vibecoding.

You're not giving us any evidence of this. You're just asserting it. Claude will happily talk about vibe coding as much as you want. One of its active working prompts is "vibing". It wasn't a popular term until early 2025. x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… > 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. ... 11:17 pm · 2 Feb 2025 5.2M Views

Maybe read the original definition: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493… Or here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding Not looking at the code at all by default is essential to the term.

This is where the term came from: x.com/karpathy/status/18861921848081493…