Chapter 8. Implementation Success Stories
In early 2025, renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy (former director of AI at Tesla and a founding member of OpenAI) coined the term vibe coding in a viral tweet:
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.
Karpathy is describing a new way in which developers often find themselves collaborating with AI tools: we give a few directions in a prompt, let the model generate the bulk of the code, then patch and iterate as we go.
Karpathy joked about skipping error messages entirely, saying that his approach ...
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