Not a Coder? With A.I., Just Having an Idea Can Be Enough

 

"I’m not a programmer. But I’ve been creating my own software tools with help from artificial intelligence.

I am not a coder. I can’t write a single line of Python, JavaScript or C++. Except for a brief period in my teenage years when I built websites and tinkered with Flash animations, I’ve never been a software engineer, nor do I harbor ambitions of giving up journalism for a career in the tech industry.

And yet, for the past several months, I’ve been coding up a storm.

Among my creations: a tool that transcribes and summarizes long podcasts, a tool to organize my social media bookmarks into a searchable database, a website that tells me whether a piece of furniture will fit in my car’s trunk and an app called LunchBox Buddy, which analyzes the contents of my fridge and helps me decide what to pack for my son’s school lunch.

These creations are all possible thanks to artificial intelligence, and a new A.I. trend known as “vibecoding.”

Vibecoding, a term that was popularized by the A.I. researcher Andrej Karpathy, is useful shorthand for the way that today’s A.I. tools allow even nontechnical hobbyists to build fully functioning apps and websites, just by typing prompts into a text box. You don’t have to know how to code to vibecode — just having an idea, and a little patience, is usually enough.

“It’s not really coding,” Mr. Karpathy wrote this month. “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.”

My own vibecoding experiments have been aimed at making what I call “software for one” — small, bespoke apps that solve specific problems in my life. These aren’t the kinds of tools a big tech company would build. There’s no real market for them, their features are limited and some of them only sort of work."