About

Vibe Coding refers to a slang term coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy to describe AI-dependant programming in which a person uses LLM assistants like Cursor AI to generate code instead of writing it themselves. This method of coding marks a shift from programmers manually coding and debugging software to programmers writing prompts and then testing and refining AI-generated source code. The term "vibe coding" gained traction in early 2025 after reports emerged that 25 percent of the Winter 2025 Y Combinator batch relied on 95 percent AI-generated code and college professors and software managers shared stories of dealing with young AI-reliant vibe coders.

Origin

On February 2nd, 2025, Open AI co-founder and former AI leader at Tesla Andrej Karpathy made a post on X^[1] defining the phrase "vibe coding," describing it as "a new kind of coding." Karpathy wrote that he uses his preferred AI coding tool Cursor Composer via voice command and "barely even touches the keyboard," and that even though this method was not perfect, "I just see things, say things, run things, and copy-paste things, and it mostly works."

The post gathered over 27,000 likes in a month and led to a series of discussions about a new crop of AI-reliant programmers now given the title, "vibe coders."

Spread

Several internet users reacted to Karpathy's tweet in early February 2025 by quoting his post with memes, as seen in a tweet by X^[2] user @IterIntellectus that uses the Rick Rubin Headphones meme to joke about what vibe coding feels like. The post gathered over 3,000 likes in a month.

On February 12th, Twitter / X^[3] user @rileybrown_ai shared a tweet captioned, "15 rules of vibe coding with Cursor," listing some best practices to help "vibe coders" create a functioning and usable codebase using AI-coding software like Cursor. The tweet gathered over 10,000 likes in a month.

However, by mid-February 2025, several internet users noted an increase in "vibe coders" who were unable to manage, understand or debug their code.

For instance, on February 13th, X^[4] user @Brycicle77 reposted a January 27th post to Reddit's /r/ChatGPTCoding^[5] subreddit that read, "So, I made a project in python entirely using Cursor (composer) and Claude, but it has gotten to a point that the whole codebase is over 30 Python files, code is super disorganized, might even have duplicate loops, and Claude keeps forgetting basic stuff like imports at this point."

On March 3rd, 2025, X^[6] user @catalinmpit posted a Desert Dilemma meme alongside text that reads, "Vibe coding is easy. Vibe debugging is the hard part." The post gathered over 5,000 likes in two weeks.

On March 16th, 2025, Redditor^[7] /u/mechanic338 made a post to the subreddit /r/ProgrammerHumor that read, "Say vibe coding one more time." The post gathered over 1,900 upvotes in three days.

On March 15th, X^[8] user @qtnx_ shared a Oppenheimer Stare of Regret meme alongside text that read, "how karpathy felt after realizing he kickstarted a new wave of grifting by tweeting this," gathering over 5,000 likes in four days.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References