Vibe Coding - Overview

Vibe Coding is the latest and highly innovating practice in software development by leveraging the AI to generate functional code. Generative AI tools are Large Language Models trainned on vast amount of data and can understand and generate natural language as well as programming language constructs. Vibe Coding leverage Generative AI tools to create code. This term was originally coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in Feb 2025 in his X post where he describes software development workflow to shift from line to line development to guiding a Generative AI to generate source code, refine it further and debug it using conversational process.

As per Andrej post −

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... The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away... It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing.

Even before Andrej coining this term, developers were using LLMs like ChatGPT, Copilot etc to assist in coding.

Primary goal of the vibe coding is to quickly spin up working code and to add new features. In traditional coding, developers are to write each code line by line; in vibe coding, developers provides instructions to LLM to produce a working code.

Types of Vibe Coding

Vibe coding can be classified broading into two types −

• Pure Vibe Coding &minus In pure vibe coding, user trusts Generative AI completely to deliver the output. This is ideal for rapid prototyping where a developer can give demo of intented product to client or owners while generating the prototype within seconds. Other use case is of speed and turn around time.

• AI Assisted Coding &minus This is more responsible and practical approact while using AI to assist in application development. In AI assisted coding, a developer uses a LLM as a pair programmer. A developers provides prompts to AI to generate code, and then take full responsibility of the generated code by testing, reviewing and understanding the code completely.

Advantages of Vibe Coding

Following are the advantages of following vibe coding −

• Fully functional code can be developed using natural language prompts.

• Accelerated development as most of boiler plate coding part is handled by LLM.

• A very little or no coding experience required to follow vibe coding.

• Developers can focus on bigger picture or on mail goal of the app or application.

• App building becomes much easier and AI handles most of the intricacies.

Use Cases for Non-Programmers

Vibe coding allows non-programmers to create applications or apps without any prior knowledge of any programming language. They can quickly create a prototype of what they are thinking of by simply giving instruction to an LLM tool. This approach is very useful for project managers who wants to showcase a prototype, general public who want to automate their day to day activities or small scale business owners. Consider the following use cases −

• Marketing/sales executives can create an app to demonstrate the vision of the product/service they are looking to promote. They can specify the features to generative AI in plain natural lanaguage and generative AI will create a working prototype for them to display to their customers. Once prototype is approved, same can be handed over the development team to own the code and prepare a production ready software.

• A teacher can create a online tuition portal by mentioning the subjects and AI will create a portal for given subjects with progress tracking mechanism, AI powered chat options and many other features as mentioned to it in conversational feedbacks.

• Data Scientists/Engineer can envision their data analysis by asking LLM tools to create a prototype and then test using given data sets.

Use Cases for Programmers

For programmers, vibe coding can prove to be a blessing as they need not to focus on boilerplate codes or to write code functionality line by line. They can focus on main functionalities instead of low level implementations. Consider the following use cases for more clarifications −

• Rapid Prototyping − Developers can use vibe coding to create prototypes or POCs (Proof of Concepts) quickly to demonstrate feasibility of the required functionalities. The initial code generated by AI tool once approved can be refined further by AI itself or by developers, reviewers. This approach speeds up development process especially in complex scenarios.

• Integrate New Features Quickly − Using vibe coding, new features can be quickly by asking AI to add a feature in plain natural language. This features enhances productivity to next levels as developers are not required to write much of boilerplate code and many business scenarios are already implemented by AI.

• Refactoring Code − Vibe Coding can refactor existing codebases as well. AI tools can analyze the code and suggests code improvements which reduces the efforts of developers to review and rewrite large portions of the code.