‘Vibe coding’ is a revolution for optimistic creatives
When we flew out to the AI Engineering Summit in New York I knew the ‘vibe coding’ stickers would be a hit. Something about the phrase captures a moment in time. As conversations unfolded it is clear ‘Vibe Coding’ is more than a meme—it’s a symbol of optimism and the sign of a coming wave.
What is vibe coding? Where did this come from?
It all started with a Tweet by Andrej Karpathy, a well known AI expert, that has since snowballed with others like Rick Rubin as he became the face of the meme.
“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. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it. I “Accept All” always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I’d have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.” - Andrej Karpathy’s tweet.
In a literal sense, vibe coding is the use of Cursor Composer (or similar tools) that don’t just take a prompt to produce semi-working code, but iterate, lint, and run tests autonomously. In real terms that means you leave your editor running, grab coffee, and come back to fully working features. The consequence is exponential productivity gains measured in orders of magnitude.
To take the autonomous car analogy, as an industry, we’ve been trying to ’get the car out of the car park’ with coding assistants. Fun and intriguing but not exactly ‘game changing’. Yet, vibe coding feels like stepping out from your first autonomous car journey across a city. It’s a feeling that has to be experienced first-hand to feel the immense potential.
An unleashed wave of creativity
For software engineers their superpower has always been the ability to manifest ideas into reality. Vibe coding represents a future where developers no longer waste hours on painful type errors or missing semi-colons, they instead spend time focusing on the creative essence of software development: imagining and exploring what to build next.
At the conference I heard countless variations of “we’re building vibe coding for X”, tools that create flow, enhance creativity, and reduce friction by aligning humans and machines. We’re witnessing the early days of a transformation that will ripple far beyond software and will reshape how we approach creative and technical work across every industry.
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At Gitpod, we’re bringing ‘vibe coding’ to enterprise.
