With ‘Vibecoding,’ A.I. Can Help Anyone Build an App: Shop Talk

“Bringing on artificial intelligence as a collaborator can make coding feel more accessible to those with little training in it, but there are trade-offs.

 

What is a vibe? Many know it when they see it. A vibe is a certain energy, a sense of familiarity, “a placeholder for an abstract quality that you can’t pin down,” as Kyle Chayka wrote in The New Yorker in 2021. Nominally short for vibration, “vibes” started spreading in countercultural circles in the 1960s, and the term has lately mushroomed into a ubiquitous stand-in. People vibe with one another, cherish good vibes, catch a vibe, vibe out.

 

And, in recent months, coders and laypersons alike have been “vibecoding,” that is, using conversational language to prompt artificial intelligence to generate code for websites or apps.

 

Popularized by the OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy early this year, “vibecoding” has enjoyed a rapid ascent into the tech lexicon, embraced by both hobbyists and Silicon Valley executives — and has broken out beyond the world of coders, too. The approach of cocreating with A.I. has spawned vibe marketing, vibe designing, vibe analytics and even just “vibe working,” which Microsoft frames as prompting A.I. for help creating slide decks and spreadsheets on the job.

 

/vīb-kōd-iŋ/

 

Part of the term’s appeal is its pithiness, suggested Kyle Jensen, a professor at the Yale School of Management who has taught workshops on vibecoding. “‘A.I.-assisted software development’ doesn’t roll off the tongue” in the same way, he said.

 

The casual sort of, well, vibe of vibecoding may be part of what makes the approach seem accessible to those who might otherwise be too intimidated to write code. Now, even without knowing Java or C++, people can ask A.I. tools to help them start sites that generate cute puppy names, or apps that advise on what meals to make with certain fridge foods, as The New York Times’s Kevin Roose did.

 

Still, Dr. Jensen said, it’s not always as easy as it looks to get a bot to build you a site. A.I. tools can make mistakes, or veer off in random directions, and humans who understand programming languages will have a smoother time sussing out issues and keeping projects on track, he added.

 

And others have recently pointed out the limits of vibecoding.

 

We are still in the early days of working closely with A.I. — and people are figuring out their relationship to these processes. Is an A.I. tool an assistant? A colleague? A boss?

 

Simon Last, a founder of the software start-up Notion, told Lauren Goode of Wired that using A.I. coding tools was like managing interns. Ms. Goode, after she tried out vibecoding, wrote that she felt like “a responsible babysitter for code.” Dr. Jensen referred to A.I. tools as a capable project partner — one that could help students learn quickly, or one that could remove some of the struggle inherent to growing as a developer.

 

Vibecoding could make development faster and easier. But it may come with some trade-offs. Dr. Jensen, himself an experienced developer, has lately embraced what he called the “super joyous” experience of using A.I. to execute creative projects. Still, he said that skilled coders “might feel sheepish” about collaborating with such tools. After years of “having taken pride in a craft, learned its nuances, one maybe even feels a bit ashamed to outsource it,” he said.

 

Vibe is a vague, expansive term, one people sometimes turn to when they lack other, more precise descriptors. For now, at least — as some executives issue A.I. fiats, some workers resist and everyone tries to figure out how to adapt — vibecoding subtly echoes the ambiguity of a human-computer relationship that is still in flux.” [1]

 

1. With ‘Vibecoding,’ A.I. Can Help Anyone Build an App: Shop Talk. Kelley, Lora.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Oct 24, 2025.