What is Vibe Coding? The New Way to Build Software

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla) tweeted something that resonated with hundreds of thousands of people. He called it "vibe coding."

"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."

That tweet didn't just go viral. It slapped a name on something thousands of people were already doing: describing what they wanted and letting AI write the code.

Most articles about vibe coding treat it like a party trick. Something fun to poke at on a Saturday. I've taught over 100 people to build software with AI, and here's what I can tell you: vibe coding isn't a toy. It's a fundamental shift in who gets to build software and how fast things get shipped.

What Vibe Coding Actually Is

Vibe coding means building software by having a conversation with an AI instead of writing code line by line. You describe what you want in plain English. The AI generates the code, runs it, fixes errors, and iterates until it works.

The key distinction: you're not editing code. You're not debugging syntax errors. You're not reading Stack Overflow at 2 AM. You're directing an AI agent that handles all of that for you.

Here's what a real vibe coding session looks like:

1. You open a terminal and fire up an AI coding tool (like Claude Code)
2. You say: "Build me a landing page for a dog walking business with a booking form"
3. The AI creates the project, writes the HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and sets it up
4. You say: "Make the header bigger and add a section with pricing, 3 tiers"
5. The AI modifies the code and you see the result
6. You keep iterating until it's exactly what you want

That's it. No IDE setup. No framework decisions. No dependency management. You describe, the AI builds, you refine.

Why This Is Different From "Using AI to Help You Code"

ChatGPT can generate code snippets. GitHub Copilot can autocomplete lines. Those are useful tools for existing developers. Vibe coding is fundamentally different.

The difference is agency. In vibe coding, the AI isn't suggesting code for you to review and paste. It's autonomously creating files, running commands, testing things, and fixing its own mistakes. You're the product manager, not the engineer.

This matters because it changes who can build software. When you need to understand code to use the tool, you've just made a faster version of traditional development. When you can work purely in natural language, you've opened the door to an entirely new class of builders.

Who Vibe Coding Is For

Most tutorials assume vibe coding is for developers who want to go faster. They're wrong. The biggest impact is on people who couldn't build software before:

• Product managers who are tired of waiting 3 sprints for a prototype. One of my students built a complete customer dashboard in an afternoon. Her engineering team had it on the backlog for 6 months.
• Founders who need an MVP but can't afford a dev team. A student launched a SaaS landing page with Stripe integration in a single day, with zero coding background.
• Marketing teams who need internal tools. One team built a content calendar with automated social posting. Their engineering org had deprioritized it indefinitely.
• Designers who want to bring their mockups to life without handing off to developers and waiting weeks for something that doesn't match.
• Operations people who need automations, dashboards, and data tools but don't have engineering resources.

If you have good taste and can describe what you want clearly, you can vibe code. The limiting factor isn't technical knowledge. It's clarity of thought.

The Tools That Make It Work

Not every AI tool is built for vibe coding. The ones that work best are agentic, meaning they can take actions autonomously, not just generate text.

Claude Code by Anthropic is the tool I teach with and recommend. It runs in your terminal, can read and write files across your entire project, run commands, install packages, and iterate on its own work. It's the closest thing to having a senior developer sitting next to you, except it works at 3 AM and never gets annoyed when you change your mind.

Other tools in this space include Cursor (an AI-enhanced IDE), Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot's agent mode. Each has trade-offs. Claude Code's advantage for vibe coding specifically is that you never need to open a code editor. You stay in the conversation the entire time.

What You Can Actually Build

The scope of what's possible today is genuinely surprising. Here are real projects from my students, people who had never written a line of code:

• A full Next.js web application with user authentication, database, and payment processing
• An internal tool that pulls data from Salesforce and generates weekly reports
• A Chrome extension that highlights key information on competitor websites
• An automated email sequence builder with A/B testing
• A customer-facing dashboard with real-time data visualization
• Mobile-responsive landing pages that pass Google PageSpeed audits

The common thread: these are all projects that would traditionally require hiring a developer or waiting in an engineering queue. With vibe coding, they took hours instead of weeks.

The Limitations (And Why They Matter Less Than You Think)

I'll be blunt about what vibe coding isn't great for:

• Systems that need to handle millions of users: the AI can build something that works, but high-scale architecture requires deep engineering knowledge
• Security-critical applications: banking, healthcare, anything where a bug could cause real harm needs professional review
• Complex real-time systems: multiplayer games, trading platforms, and similar need specialized expertise

But here's the thing: most software doesn't need any of that. The vast majority of useful software is internal tools, landing pages, data dashboards, automations, and simple web apps. Vibe coding handles all of those brilliantly.

The 80/20 rule applies perfectly. Vibe coding gives you 80% of what professional development delivers, at maybe 5% of the cost and time. For most use cases, that's not just good enough. It's a total inversion of who holds the power to build.

Getting Started

If you want to try vibe coding, the simplest path is:

1. Install Claude Code: takes about 2 minutes with npm or brew
2. Open your terminal and type claude
3. Describe something simple: "Create an HTML page that shows today's date and a random quote"
4. Watch it build, then iterate: "Add a button to get a new quote" or "Make it look more professional with dark mode"

Start small. Build confidence. Then tackle something real. The learning curve isn't about learning to code. It's about learning to communicate clearly with an AI. That's a skill most professionals already have. You can read more about how to use Claude Code step by step.