Former Tesla AI czar Andrej Karpathy coins ‘vibe coding’: Here’s what it means

Andrej Karpathy, the former Director of AI at Elon Musk’s Tesla, has coined a new term called “vibe coding”. Taking to X, he described the term as a situation where a person fully given in to the vibes, embraces exponentials and forgets that the code even exists.

“It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good,” he said.

Sharing how he does ‘vibe coding’, Karpathy said he just talks to “Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even though the keyboard”.

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He further revealed that he asks the AI for the “dumbest things’ like decreasing the padding on the sidebar by half because he’s 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,” he said.

He added that the code he writes in this way usually grows beyond his usual comprehension. “I would have to really read through it for a while,” he said.

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“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,” Karpathy remarked.

He said he is building a project or webapp but added that it is not really coding. “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works,” he added.

How did netizens react?

An X user said it is amazing to see someone as smart as Karpathy embracing AI at the level at which he is embracing. “A few devs think it’s a badge of honour to write everything themselves and not use AI, unaware someone using AI will replace them first and soon,” the user said.

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“The amount of LLM assist you receive is clearly some kind of a slider. All the way on the left you have programming as it existed ~3 years ago. All the way on the right you have vibe coding. Even vibe coding hasn’t reached its final form yet. I’m still doing way too much,” Karpathy responded.

Another user said, “Been doing this for a year,” while a third user said, “What could possibly go wrong.”