People use "vibe coding" to mean different things - some mean the original Karpathy "look ma, no hands!", feel the vibez, thing, and some just (confusingly) use "vibe coding" to refer to any use of AI to write code, including treating it as a tool to write small well-defined parts that you have specified, as opposed to treating it as a magic genie.

There also seem to be people hearing big names like Karpathy and Linus Torvalds say they are vibe coding on their hobby projects, meaning who knows what, and misunderstanding this as being an endorsement of "magic genie" creation of professional quality software.

Results of course also vary according to how well what you are asking the AI to do matches what it was trained on. Despite sometimes feeling like it, it is not a magic genie - it is a predictor that is essentially trying to best match your input prompt (maybe a program specification) to pieces of what it was trained on. If there is no good match, then it'll have a go anyway, and this is where things tend to fall apart.

▲

dudeinhawaii 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Funny, the last interview I watched with Karpathy he highlighted the way the AI/LLM was unable to think in a way that aligned with his codebase. He described vibe-coding a transition from Python to Rust but specifically called out that he hand-coded all of the python code due to weaknesses in LLM's ability to handle performant code. I'm pretty sure this was the last Dwarkesh interview with "LLMs as ghosts".

	▲	HarHarVeryFunny 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right, and he also very recently said that he felt essentially left behind by AI coding advances, thinking that his productivity could be 10x if he knew how to use it better. It seems clear that Karpathy himself is well aware of the difference between "vibe coding" as he defined it (which he explicitly said was for playing with on hobby projects), and more controlled productive use of AI for coding, which has either eluded him, or maybe his expectations are too high and (although it would be surprising) he has not realized the difference between the types of application where people are finding it useful, and use cases like his own that do not play to its strength.

▲

threethirtytwo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

karpathy is biased. I wouldn't use his name as he's behind the whole vibe coding movement.

You have to pick people with nothing to gain. https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2013280952370573666

	▲	HarHarVeryFunny 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think he meant to start a movement - it was more of a throw-away tweet that people took way too seriously, although maybe with his bully pulpit he should have realized that would happen.