On stage at Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration in Redmond earlier this month, CEO Satya Nadella showed a video of himself retracing the code of the company’s first-ever product, with help from AI.
“You know intelligence has been commoditized when CEOs can start vibe coding,” he told the hundreds of employees in attendance.
The comment was a sign of how much this term—and the act and mindset it aptly describes—have taken root in the tech world. Over the past few months, the normally exacting art of coding has seen a profusion of ✨vibes✨ thanks to AI.
The meme started with a post from former Tesla Senior Director of AI Andrej Karpathy in February. Karpathy described it as an approach to coding “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”
The concept gained traction because it touched on a transformation—a vibe shift?—that was already underway among some programmers, according to Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of AI app development platform Replit. As LLM-powered tools like Cursor, Replit, and Windsurf—which is reportedly in talks to be acquired by OpenAI—have gotten smarter, AI has made it easier to just…sort of…wing it.
“Coding has been seen as this—as hard a science as you can get. It’s very concrete, mathematical structure, and needs to be very precise,” Masad told Tech Brew. “What is the opposite of precision? It is vibes, and so it is communicating to the public that coding is no longer about precision. It’s more about vibes, ideas, and so on.”
The rise of automated programming could transform the field of software development. Companies are already increasingly turning to AI platforms to expedite coding work, data from spend management platform Ramp shows. While experts say coding skills are needed to debug and understand context while vibe coding, AI will likely continue to bring down the barrier to entry for creating software.
What’s the vibe?
Coding has long been one of the most intuitive use cases for LLMs. OpenAI first introduced Codex, its AI programming tool based on GPT-3, more than a year before the debut of ChatGPT in 2022. Companies of all kinds often tell us that code development work is one of the first places they attempt to apply generative AI internally.
But the act of vibe coding describes a process beyond simple programming assistance, according to Karpathy’s original post. It’s an attitude of blowing through error messages and directing the AI to perform simple tasks rather than doing it oneself—and trusting that the AI will sort it all out in the end.
“It’s not really coding—I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works,” he wrote.
How is it used?
Masad said he builds personal apps like health tracking tools and data dashboards at work with Replit, which is one of the less coding-heavy of these platforms. Sometimes, he will attempt to spin up a substitute tool if he doesn’t want to pay for an enterprise software subscription. He recently used the platform to make a YouTube video downloader because he was sick of ads on existing websites.
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Srini Iragavarapu, director of generative AI applications and developer experiences at Amazon Web Services, told us that coding tools like Amazon Q Developer have helped his software developer team more easily switch between coding languages they were previously unfamiliar with. AI is not fully automating coding works, he said, but allowing developers to get up to speed on new tasks more easily.
“The time to entry, and even to ramp up to newer things, is what is getting reduced drastically because of this,” Iragavarapu said. “[It] means now you’re chugging out features for customers a lot faster to solve their own sets of problems as well.”
Data from corporate spend management platform Ramp showed that business spending on AI coding platforms like Cursor, Lovable, and Codeium (now Windsurf) grew at a faster clip in the first months of this year than model companies more broadly. Ramp economist Ara Kharazian said this difference was significant despite the comparison being between smaller companies and more established ones.
“The kind of month-over-month growth that we’re seeing right now is still pretty rare,” Kharazian said. “If the instinct is to think that vibe coding is something that’s caught on in the amateur community or by independent software engineers just making fun tools…we’re also seeing this level of adoption in high-growth software companies, everything from startups to enterprise, adoption across sectors, certainly concentrated in the tech sector, but by fairly large companies that are spending very large amounts of money onboarding many of their users and software engineers onto these tools.”
What’s the catch?
Not everyone agrees that vibe coding is quite ready to transform the industry. Peter Wang, chief AI and innovation officer and co-founder of data science and AI distribution platform Anaconda, said it’s currently more useful for senior developers who know the specific prompts to create what they need, and how to assemble and test those pieces.
“It’s definitely the beginning of something interesting, but in its current form, it’s quite limited,” Wang said. “It’s sort of like if someone who’s already an industrial designer goes and 3D prints all the parts of a car, versus someone who’s not an industrial designer trying to 3D print a whole car from scratch. One’s going to go way better than the other.”
Wang said he thinks that vibe coding will really start to come into its own when it can yield modular parts of software that even an amateur coder might easily assemble into whatever program they need.
“What I’m looking for is the emergence of something like a new approach to programs that makes little modular pieces that can be assembled more robustly by the vibe coding approach,” Wang said. “We don’t really have that Easy Bake thing yet. Right now, it’s like, ‘Here’s the recipe. Go cook the entire meal for me.’...I think if we can actually get to that point, then it’ll unlock a world of possibilities.”