‘Vibe coding’ or instant acceptance of prompt-based code written by AI tooling such as ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot is increasingly becoming the norm for writing code. The question arises whether this abandonment of traditional human control and precision in code development is desirable.
Recently, former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy coined a new name for directly using code written by AI: vibe coding. Specifically, this concept involves writing a program in normal language and having an LLM translate it into working code. This is done without the client understanding exactly how this code works and then implementing it directly.
This technique is possible because LLMs and more specific tools like Cursor Composer, GitHub Copilot and Replit Agent are now so powerful that even non-programmers can easily have code generated. This makes code more “democratic,” but does not guarantee that this way of coding is suitable for real-world application development.
Non-traditional
The new programming technique runs counter to traditional software development methods and best practices. These mainly emphasize careful planning, testing and understanding of the developed code and its implementation.
While vibe coding speeds up code development and implementation and makes it accessible to all, concerns exist. Especially in terms of potential bugs that are introduced.
These bugs mean that developers still have to go through the entire code to discover them. Then, using a prompt, they must run the code through the AI tool again to have the bugs removed. This often results in extra work, but Andrej Karpathy doesn’t seem to care: “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.”
Increasingly common
Vibe coding appears to be increasingly adopted by code developers and tech companies. Ars Technica states that AI coding tools such as Cursor Composer (40,000 paying end users), GitHub Copilot (1.3 million users) and Replit Agent (claimed to have 30 million users) are becoming increasingly popular.
In addition, the new programming technique is finding a lot of traction, especially in building game prototypes quickly. It is also used for writing utilities or processing scripts.
Responsible use
For the future, vibe coding seems to be “here to stay. However, to Ars Technica, experts indicate that they do not yet consider this form of coding suitable for developing applications that go into production. According to them, the quality and understanding of code for these applications remain essential. This is true not only because of the aforementioned bugs, but also because of the potential hallucinations that LLMs can produce.
The experts, therefore, believe that vibe coding is certainly suitable for small or personal projects, but that developers must take proper responsibility when they want to put code developed this way into production for serious projects.
Also read: AI in software development: from experiment to standard