Just like fashion, technology has its trends. One month it’s crypto wallets, the next it’s no-code builders. And now? Welcome to the age of vibe coding the newest trend sweeping the developer world. It’s flashy and chaotic. Less “learn to code” and more “click and manifest.”
Influencers are posting videos of AI building apps in minutes. Type a prompt, watch code appear like magic, and boom—you’ve built a startup (or so it seems). Vibe coding is the latest flavor in a long list of developer microcultures following on from speed coding and live coding. But while those encouraged learning and understanding, vibe coding? It’s the opposite. It’s coding without the coding. It is taking the Valley by storm, and it’s a trend that isn’t going away anytime soon.
“This isn’t a fad. This isn’t going away. This is the dominant way to code. And if you are not doing it, you might just be left behind,” said Garry Tan, CEO of YC. In February, Business Insider dismissed it as a mere buzzword. By March, a quarter of the W25 YC startup batch had 95% of their codebases generated by AI, according to YC managing partner Jared Friedman.
With startups like Cursor, Lovable, Magic, Bolt.new and Codeium already raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding in the last year.
What Is Vibe Coding?
The term was introduced in February 2025 by Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former AI leader at Tesla. At its core, vibe coding is simply letting LLMs code for you and clicking “accept.” (*Hey Chat, make me a SaaS platform, now! sounds of whiplash)
Its an easy yet very effective way for non-techies, non-coders, non-programmers to create software without fully understanding how it works. “It’s not really coding,” Karpathy stated in the same post. And that is both its key selling point and its biggest problem, users blindly accept generated code without understanding it.
The Vibe vs. Reality
Vibe coding is cool for quick weekend projects, hackathons, prototypes, or max beta releases. However, it’s far from ideal for public, money-making projects or, god forbid, startups.
It makes people feel almighty but the reality is different. LLM-generated code is only safe in the hands of those who understand it. Otherwise, you might end up like this one dude who built a SaaS business entirely through vibe coding, posted on X how cool he was and had it collapse due to major security vulnerabilities and kind people from X exploiting them.
So vibe code responsibly, Or if you’re working on a personal tool or a small-scale project, go for it. Take, for example, the American journalist Kevin Roose a NY Times writer who vibe-coded an app using Bolt to make his son breakfast based on what was in the fridge. But if you’re deploying anything public, you’d better know what you’re doing.
While vibe coding can be dangerous in the hands of inexperienced “developers”. Programming without LLMs today is like doing math without a calculator. But while calculators don’t make up random bullshit, LLMs sometimes do. And that’s why even though AI now writes 25% of all code in companies like Google, engineers still have to review it line by line.
How to Vibe Code Responsibly
The top advice to vibe code responsible would be to:
- Use popular, well documented languages and frameworks
- Use version control git to save your work
- Change your mindset from coder to project manager (sounds of whiplash).
The biggest problem with LLMs is they don’t create anything new. So if we view them as a tool to extract useful information from Stack Overflow without getting told to “fuck off” and “write your own damn code” then yes, they’re game-changers and save a lot of time. But don’t be surprised if the occasional “fuck off” message still sneaks through.
