Welcome to the weird world of vibe coding

Some people say it is the future; others are calling it the punk rock of software. And then there are those who say it is a massive problem and it’s going to kill software engineering because it’s really just copy-paste stack overflow. Welcome to vibe coding, a new way to program where you let AI do all the work for you. Andrej Karpathy, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, wrote on X that LLMs are getting so good that instead of writing code, you can “fully give into the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget that code even exists”. Karpathy said he’s even gone so far as to use SuperWhisper, a speech-to-text AI tool, which means he doesn’t even have to use his keyboard when vibe coding projects.

Turning an idea into an application without knowing how to code sounds good, theoretically, but where do you actually start? I decided to test a few to find out if they really can “democratise programming”, regardless of your technical background. Is it really possible to code without learning a programming language? Can vibe coding make complex technical concepts easier to understand? While there are some seasoned developers who have been vocal around the quality of the actual code you’re going to get, and are questioning its reliability, there are others who are focusing on the fun part of it all. If it works, it works…so why not use vibe coding as a learning tool?