What Is ‘Vibe’ Coding? Will It Change Software Engineering? Trend Explained

Last Updated:March 30, 2025, 15:06 IST

Vibe coding allows users to prompt or ask large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot to produce the code for an app or service, with AI doing all the work

Vibe coding can be seen as a major security risk as it replaces experienced human coders with untrained coders who give orders to AI chatbots instead of coding from scratch.(Unsplash/Representative Image)

Want to generate a computer code without even a programme? Enter “vibe coding" – a term that describes the use of AI tools, including large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla employee Andrej Karpathy described the coding process the new kind of “vibes", which embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. “It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w [sic] Sonnet) are getting too good," Karpathy posted on X.

Thus, the ‘vibe coding’ was coined. The term has taken a life of its own after AI companies released a series of new models that help users generate a code without knowing the programme.

How Does Vibe Coding Work?

“Vibe coding basically refers to using generative AI not just to assist with coding, but to generate the entire code for an app," Noah Giansiracusa at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, told New Scientist.

Users ask, or prompt, LLM-based models such as ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot to produce the code for an app or service, and the AI system does all the work.

For example, if you ask an AI tool to generate Javascript code for a pop-up that would ask users which pizza flavour they hated the most, and praise the user’s “good taste" if their answer included the term “pineapple".

While the code for this request was successfully generated, the AI tool added some extra code so that the system would comment “Interesting choice!" to users who provided other hated pizza flavours. This was something the original user forgot to consider.

A beginner can run such codes, but they would not know whether the AI generated code could be shorter, more efficient, or tweaked to be more user-friendly, as per a report by The Hindu. “In essence, we ran the AI-generated code, but neither created nor thought about its structure."

Is Vibe Coding Good?

Vibe coding can be seen as a major security risk as it replaces experienced human coders with amateurs or untrained coders who give orders to AI chatbots instead of coding from scratch or understanding existing codebases.

Human project managers and coders precisely frame how the code needs to take shape in order to best serve a specific use case. But an AI code generator may not understand the larger context of what it is creating. In other words, a Gen AI tool may indeed produce the code that the user requested, but this generated code might be too slow to run, too expensive to maintain, and too long to scan regularly for security risks.

Though a human can review his AI-generated code, spot errors, shorten it, plug security vulnerabilities, increase speeds, edit text prompts. But untrained vibe coders will not able to do so.

Other critics claim that vibe coders simply copy or scrap older codes generated by other humans, raising ethical and plagiarism concerns.

According to one user, vibe coding promises direction that will get a lot better in the near future. “But at present it’s a bit limited and has some reliability issues," says Giansiracusa. The code produced can often be buggy, and because the people prompting it don’t have the inherent knowledge to fix it, they are overly reliant on the same LLMs that made the errors to fix them.

Is Vibe Coding Necessary At All?

Vibe coding can help people with ideas for tools, apps and services to make them a reality without the challenge of learning the specifics of a programming language.

The essence of vibe coding is that the coder lacks line-by-line comprehension of his own code and may not be seriously engaging with results. Such frivolous approach may work for playful apps or games. But big businesses and enterprises, which work for real issues, would need real-time coders to serve their requirements.

One of the big claims about AI is its ability to replace human jobs. But there is little evidence that vibe coding will replace software engineers — despite some social media claims. “It’s not going to replace programmers," Matt Wood at Northumbria University, UK, told New Scientist.

Thus, it would improbable for vibe coders to compete with professional human coders who leverage AI coding in a skilled manner.

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