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In a post on X in February, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term, said, “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.”
According to the news agency AFP, vibe coding refers to the process of instantly generating code using generative AI models, such as ChatGPT, Cursor, Bolt, or Claude, by simply using everyday language, either written or spoken.
"I'm building a project or web app, but it's not really coding – I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works," Karpathy explained in the post.
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While AI tools can certainly speed up coding or even take over the entire process for beginners, fixing a problem is no simple feat if you don't understand what you're working with. Users with no expertise in the area will most certainly find themselves in a dilemma when faced with challenges such as bugs or such errors.
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Moreover, creating apps or websites that function well is difficult without a grasp of key concepts like digital directories, runtime environments, or application programming interfaces (APIs).
Sharing his views on X, Jonathan Blow, a designer and programmer, said: "Vibe Coding is great because after 3 weeks you can have a game that seems like it was made at a weekend game jam, except it will also have a nasty low frame rate and lots of weird bugs! You can hook up payments to this not-really-game and then lie about how much it makes!”
What industry executives say about coding and AI
Last week, OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil, stated in an interview on Overpowered, that he believes AI will surpass human coders by the end of this year, even calling it a historic moment in tech. This came in response to Anthropic’s prediction that coding automation would take until 2027 to become a reality.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently predicted that AI could be responsible for writing 90% of all code within the next 3-6 months, with the possibility of automating "nearly all coding" within a year.
Meanwhile, Garry Tan, CEO and president of Y Combinator, told CNBC that a small team of just 10 skilled coders could be on track to creating the next multi-million-pound start-up, a task that would typically require 50 or 100 engineers.
In an interview with Ben Thompson of Stratechery, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussed the future of software engineers, stating that, beyond a certain point, the need for them would decrease. He said, “I mean, my basic assumption is that each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while. And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers.”
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The rapid advancements in AI have raised concerns about job displacement.
"It's unlikely to make coding irrelevant, but it may change the way developers work," Yangfeng Ji, professor of computer science at the University of Virginia, told AFP. "This could lead to some job displacement, particularly for those focused solely on basic coding tasks."
In the Stratechery interview, Altman spoke about the impact of AI on jobs and the speed at which displacement could occur. When asked for his perspective, he suggested that while changes wouldn't happen overnight, they would gradually accelerate over time. He said that it “kind of just seeps through the economy and mostly kind of like eats things little by little and then faster and faster”.
The World Economic Forum's 2020 report on the Future of Jobs predicted that approximately 85 million jobs could be eliminated due to the shift between humans and machines by 2025. However, the same report also suggested that 97 million new roles may emerge, which could help offset job losses.
