Vibe coding: what is it, and how it's affecting software and gaming

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With the emergence of AI tools affecting almost every industry, few are more affected than the field of software development. 'Vibe coding' is one of the trends to emerge from that shift, and we'll go into what it is, and how it's affecting these industries.

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To start at the beginning - in February 2025, OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI lead Andrej Karpathy coined the term on X. In a widely publicized post, he describes it as a method that essentially involves letting go of the intricacies of generated code - and essentially 'fully giving in' to the vibes. In other words, embracing an intuitive, instinctual approach to writing programs - and forgetting about understanding the code itself.

In practice, what this looks like is a conversational approach to software development. As Karpathy describes, it's giving the chatbot simple, almost dumb, 'vibe driven' prompts - and letting the AI generate beyond your comprehension. For example, a user might prompt an AI coding assistant with something as vague as "Make a flight simulator where you can buy an F-16" and let the AI generate the bulk of the game's code, or "Fix the UI so it looks cleaner, but keep the aesthetic fun." Instead of making manual adjustments, vibe coders just keep iterating with broad prompts like "Make the sidebar padding feel right" or "Tweak the animations so they pop more." The AI takes over, handling all the changes while the coder simply approves or rejects based on vibes alone.

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Credit: Rye

AI researcher Simon Willison argues that a key characteristic of vibe coding is not understanding it. As a result, we're seeing a new wave of programming that centers around, well, vibes. And a swarm of websites, products, and games built on those principles.

"If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you've reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that's not vibe coding in my book - that's using an LLM as a typing assistant," Willison said.

The response from the computer science and software engineering community has been mixed. On one side, there are those who see vibe coding as a democratization of programming - lowering the barrier for non-developers and enabling faster prototyping. As tech columnist Kevin Roose put it, "What's new and notable is that with a few keystrokes, amateurs can now build products that would have previously required teams of engineers."

But on the other side, experienced developers argue that it's a shortcut that sacrifices quality, security, and maintainability. Canva's Chief Technology Officer, Brendan Humphreys, wrote on LinkedIn, "No, you won't be vibe coding your way to production. Not if you prioritize quality, safety, security, and long-term maintainability at scale."

Regardless, 'vibe coding' has exploded in the last month, rapidly gaining traction across social media and developer circles. Social media is flooded with examples of users generating games, websites, and all kinds of tools using vibe code. On one hand, it allows users to create products without any prerequisite knowledge. On the other hand, the products could be a house of cards - with scalability and quality compromised due to the hands-off approach. As developer Ben South quipped, "Vibe coding is all fun and games until you have to vibe debug."

In terms of whether vibe coding could redefine what it means, and what's required, of modern programmers, or whether it could potentially spawn a myriad of faulty, half-baked software and video games - is yet to be seen. But one thing's for certain - it's changing the way people think about coding.