The Vibe Coding Revolution Is Getting Overhyped

Yes, AI is having a huge impact on programming. No, businesses shouldn't ditch their engineers.

- Parmy Olson

The word "vibe" has become so ubiquitous that it's started to lose its meaning. A buzzy new phrase, vibe coding, has gripped the tech industry just a month after it was coined by Dr. Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and venerated programmer who posted on social media platform X that it was "where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." In other words, let artificial intelligence (AI) do all the coding for you.

Since then, the phrase has popped up everywhere in tech circles—on social media, forums like Hacker News, executive posts on LinkedIn and in Slack channels populated by start-up founders in the Y Combinator accelerator in California. "The term is blowing up," says Mr. Chaz Englander, founder of Model ML, which went through the programme in 2024.

Partly, that's because so-called reasoning models have become better at coding, and also (probably) because the word "vibe" is already everywhere: think vibeflation and vibecession.

One result is that Dr. Karpathy's phrase has broadened to refer to all forms of coding with AI assistance, and not just his description of letting AI do everything. It may also fuel suspicion among businesses that they no longer need to shell out for engineering talent, which would be short-sighted.