It is so hard to reconcile my view of Karpathy as a world class instructor who does great things like making you work out gradients via the chain rule even though you don't need to anymore with this version of Karpathy.
But I really detest the ever-growing universe of unnecessarily obscure slang. It's not clever and not informative. Good slang is akin to a word that you can figure out from its Latin origins; it makes sense, might be clever, and you can figure it out if you think about it.
Because it allows readers to get the information straight from the source, instead of relying on some random unsourced comment that's probably going to mangle the definition of a term as nebulous as "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 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."
It's a term to describe using an agentic LLM based assistant to write the majority of the code but without even taking the bare minimum of time to review the output. I laughed when people naively claimed that it was intended for proof-of-concepts only and would never be used in actual "production".
It's a newish term that I have understood to mean coding by letting the AI do nearly all the work, just telling it what you want done in broad strokes. If the code returned seems to "vibe" with what you're trying to do, then accept it.
Contrasted to AI assisted coding, where you would give much more detailed prompts with technical specifications, and read over every line to make sure you understand it before accepting a response.
In theory, vibe coding can let someone with very limited technical expertise build complete apps, so understandably a lot of people are excited by it.
In practice, it doesn't seem like we're there yet. But each new step in AI development leads to people trying again, and it's hard to deny that the results are getting better. I think we're at the stage of where AI image generators were a few years ago. Very much in the uncanny valley.
<quote:esperent>
In theory, vibe coding can let someone with very limited technical expertise build complete apps, so understandably a lot of people are excited by it.
</quote:esperent>
Actually it is booming. In bsky, X and Linkedin, I see another recipe/todo/budget management/profit tracking/SaaS starter template/landing page/people-to-follow-directory etc. being pumped out every single day. Before GenAI, this would be more like one partial feature per user every month, now post GenAI, entire product in weeks or even hours.
I believe, the indie entrepreneurs are making the maximum bang for the bucks with AI codegen compared to any other groups.
See https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 for when it was coined by Andrei Karpathy.
I've written more about it here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/ and here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/23/semantic-diffusion/
It is so hard to reconcile my view of Karpathy as a world class instructor who does great things like making you work out gradients via the chain rule even though you don't need to anymore with this version of Karpathy.
They're the same person. He's just a techno-optimist and interested in teaching.
Thanks for the reply.
But I really detest the ever-growing universe of unnecessarily obscure slang. It's not clever and not informative. Good slang is akin to a word that you can figure out from its Latin origins; it makes sense, might be clever, and you can figure it out if you think about it.
This is just douchey.
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Because the whole point of writing and publishing things online is that you don't have to type out the same explanations time and time again.
Because it allows readers to get the information straight from the source, instead of relying on some random unsourced comment that's probably going to mangle the definition of a term as nebulous as "vibe coding".
I clicked that link for you so you don't have to:
"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."
Instead of complaining, why don't you click the link that was spoon fed directly to your cursor for the canonical answer within 3 seconds?
2 replies →
It's a term to describe using an agentic LLM based assistant to write the majority of the code but without even taking the bare minimum of time to review the output. I laughed when people naively claimed that it was intended for proof-of-concepts only and would never be used in actual "production".
It's a newish term that I have understood to mean coding by letting the AI do nearly all the work, just telling it what you want done in broad strokes. If the code returned seems to "vibe" with what you're trying to do, then accept it.
Contrasted to AI assisted coding, where you would give much more detailed prompts with technical specifications, and read over every line to make sure you understand it before accepting a response.
In theory, vibe coding can let someone with very limited technical expertise build complete apps, so understandably a lot of people are excited by it.
In practice, it doesn't seem like we're there yet. But each new step in AI development leads to people trying again, and it's hard to deny that the results are getting better. I think we're at the stage of where AI image generators were a few years ago. Very much in the uncanny valley.
<quote:esperent> In theory, vibe coding can let someone with very limited technical expertise build complete apps, so understandably a lot of people are excited by it. </quote:esperent>
Actually it is booming. In bsky, X and Linkedin, I see another recipe/todo/budget management/profit tracking/SaaS starter template/landing page/people-to-follow-directory etc. being pumped out every single day. Before GenAI, this would be more like one partial feature per user every month, now post GenAI, entire product in weeks or even hours.
I believe, the indie entrepreneurs are making the maximum bang for the bucks with AI codegen compared to any other groups.
"Hey AI build me a node app that does X" "Now add a page for this" "Change this field to be that" "Integrate it with service X, Y, Z"
"don't forget to make it secure"
With 35K LoC for a simple website, I'd consider this slopcoding
Diarrheactive™