What is vibe coding, exactly?

“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,” he said. “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.” 

If this all sounds very different from poring over lines of code, that’s because Karpathy was talking about a particular style of coding with AI assistance. His words struck a chord among software developers and enthusiastic amateurs alike. In the months since, his post has sparked think pieces and impassioned debates across the internet. But what exactly is vibe coding? Who does it benefit, and what’s its likely future?

So, what is it?

To truly understand vibe coding, it’s important to note that while the term may be new, the coding technology behind it isn’t. For the past few years, general-purpose chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google DeepMind’s Gemini have been getting better at writing code to build software, including games, websites, and apps. But it’s the recent advent of specially created AI coding assistants, including Cursor’s Chat (previously known as Composer) and GitHub Copilot, that really ushered in vibe coding. These assistants can make real-time predictions about what you’re trying to do and offer intuitive suggestions to make it easier than ever to create software, even if you’ve never written code before.

“Over the past three or four years, these AI autocomplete tools have become better and better—they started off completing single lines of code and can now rewrite an entire file for you, or create new components,” says Barron Webster, a software designer at the interface company Sandbar. “The remit of what you can take your hands off the wheel and let the machine do is continually growing over time.”  

… and what doesn’t count as vibe coding?

But not all AI-assisted coding is vibe coding. To truly vibe-code, you have to be prepared to let the AI fully take control and refrain from checking and directly tweaking the code it generates as you go along—surrendering to the vibes. In Karpathy’s longer post he explained that when he’s vibe coding, he breezily accepts all suggestions that Cursor’s tool gives him and puts his trust in its ability to fix its own mistakes. “When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it,” he wrote. “Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away.”