Thoughts on vibe coding

Recently, there’s a trend called “vibe coding,” proposed by Andrej Karpathy. It essentially means that by just telling what you want to build to LLMs, without writing a single line of code, everyone can build a standalone application. Many developers on X and Reddit are currently hyped about it, and I wanted to share my two cents.

Existing LLMs (e.g., Claude) and IDEs (e.g., Cursor) still have context length limitations and tend to hallucinate when problems become complex. Software engineering, on the other hand, is fundamentally about managing and controlling complexity when engineering a piece of software. This is the main reason that many “serious” developers remain skeptical about vibe coding and think the products created through vibe coding are merely toys.

But so what? From my own experience, even though I’m a developer with a CS degree from university, I still enjoy many benefits from vibe coding. Here are the reasons:

1. It drastically reduces cold-start cognitive overhead. Usually, there’s a mental struggle if I want to sit in front of my computer and start coding. Part of this is because I have a day job that’s pretty energy-consuming. And as we all know, daily energy is limited. If someone spends too much energy on their day job, it’s extremely difficult for them to start working on anything meaningful afterward. Often, they’ll end up scrolling mindlessly until bedtime. Vibe coding changes this, at least for me. When I have an idea, I no longer think, “Oh, I have to search for documentation, find out how the APIs are used, then write boilerplate classes…” Instead, vibe coding incentivizes me to START. And sometimes, simply starting can work magic.

2. It is an active way to learn. We often hear of the phenomenon called “tutorial hell,” where a person constantly watches YouTube videos without ever actually making anything useful. Shamefully, I used to be that kind of person. I’d watch hours of videos to “pretend” to learn some new technology, making myself feel I wasn’t wasting time. In reality, I’d forget most of the content after a few days. Now, however, I can embrace a trial-and-error process with the help of AI, and in most cases, I genuinely start picking up knowledge along the way.

3. It actually works. Although there are inevitably problems to solve along the way, the model doesn’t complain if you feed it error messages. Problem-solving is an essential skill in almost every field—now, we simply have an excellent helper. Previously, we had to search extensively on the internet and browse through hundreds of Stack Overflow posts (I still do sometimes).

4. A combination of programming and business is a killer combo. As a programmer myself, I have hobbies beyond coding. I know there are hardcore developers whose hobby is also programming, but I must admit I’m not among those prodigies. Once in a while, I also want to connect with the real world. I notice many developers being picky about apps created by non-developers, dismissing them as trivial. However, sometimes, these apps become quite popular because customers don’t care about how they’re built. In reality, many people’s needs are unmet, and programming remains a privilege limited to a few. I’m intrigued by what ideas individuals from other domains might have once they can easily create their own applications. While we often joke about the stereotypical ideas newbie indie developers choose—note-taking, weather, or finance-tracking apps—I’m confident that “outsiders” might have even more fascinating ideas than we developers could come up with.

In the end, I must acknowledge it’s still not easy. You still need to spend time sitting in front of a computer to make vibe coding work. Instead of traditional coding, you’re continuously expressing yourself through writing. As Andrej Karpathy once said, “the hottest new programming language is English.” You simply can’t bypass that effort—no one, including LLMs, can read your mind. Moving forward, I encourage everyone to pay attention to people’s real-life needs, starting by building something you’d like to have on your phone yourself. It will be fun.