It's a bit strange that Karpathy's "vibe coding" ever gained traction as a concept, although perhaps only among those without enough experience to know better.

As I understand it, what Karpathy was referring to as "vibe coding" was some sort of flow state "just talk to the AI, never look back" thing. Don't look at the generated code, just feel the AGI vibes ...

It sounds absolutely horrific if you care even the tiniest bit about the quality of what you are building! Good for laughs and "AGI is here!" Twitter posts, maybe for home projects and throwaway scripts, but as a way of developing serious software ?!!!

I think part of the reason this has taken off (other than the cool sounding name) is because it came from Karpathy. The same idea from anyone less well known would have probably been shot down.

I've seen junior developers (and even not so junior), pre-AI, code in this kind of way - copy some code from someplace and just hack it until it works. Got a nasty core dump bug? - just reorder your source code until it goes away. At minimum in a corporate environment this way or working would get you talked to, if not put on a performance plan or worse!

For many non-technical people, their relationships with software engineers were producing horrific results. Vibe coding is an indictment of what we’ve been delivering. That a vibe-coded disaster is in any way desirable reflects poorly on us. The branding by Karpathy is cute but irrelevant to its success.

I know people running vibe coded startups. The software quality is garbage. But it does what they want. And that’s all they care about for now. Until a time when software quality impacts their business more than losing control does, they’ll keep vibe coding, rather than hiring a software engineer who bastardises their ideas.

A garbage version of the thing you want is better than a perfect version of something you don’t want.

I still maintain that the original tweet about it was a joke, or at least not a suggestion for doing real work but just a reflection on the freedom of yolo mode coding. It wasn't meant to be instructions.

Like it or not vibe coding is here to stay, I too don't agree with the concept but have told people in my org that I've 'vibe coded' this or 'vibe coded' that. To us it just means we used AI to write most of the code.

I would never have it be put into production without any type of review though, it's more for "I vibe coded this cool app, take a look, maybe this can be something bigger..."

Yes definitely, but I'm pretty sure that he was just saying vibe coding is POSSIBLE and a fun thing to try, to see how far you can get (which is true, it can do some surprising things)

Not that companies should literally try to "vibe code" production software

Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what “vibe coding” means - https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/1/not-vibe-coding/

( I think Karpathy addressed what he meant in this video, though I forget the details: Software Is Changing (Again) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQ )

The phrase got totally taken out of context, probably because it's what people WANTED to believe. They wanted to believe that the hard thing was now easy, and they could make/save a lot of money that way

I feel at this point ‘vibe coding’ is just a disparaging phrase of any AI coding assistance.

As always people can create both good and bad code using the tools at their disposal but right now there’s a lot of upvotes to be had online by simply posting ‘lol vibe coding so dumb!’. It’s tiring at this point.

> It's a bit strange that Karpathy's "vibe coding" ever gained traction as a concept

This point in history is not characterized by any real sort of seriousness about...anything, really.

Alternatively, it is the same sort of pleasant fiction that is being fed to CEOs about their workforce being able to be replaced Real Soon.

I suspect that he, as an insider is able to prompt and configure so that he gets good usable results every time, and when he describes that, it sounds so easy and obviously you should do it too.