In 2025, people “vibe code” by asking Claude, Cursor/o3, and Comet to build and modify software end-to-end—pushing PRs without reading the code, one-shotting games and web apps, wiring databases via MongoDB’s MCP, and even generating thousands of projects (one team reports $48,952.95 in model spend with zero human-written code). The tradeoffs show up quickly: posts describe production friction and outdated dependencies, loss of code understanding and fast-accumulating tech debt, and a security failure where a vibe-coded app exposed user data via a simple GET; practical mitigations include asking the agent to clean, de-bloat, and document after it finishes. Tools keep lowering the bar (Gemini 2.5 Pro for coding; OSS agent platforms that read/write files and run commands), but the guidance is to use vibe coding for prototypes or constrained features and apply human review before scale.
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A must-bookmark for vibe-coders. @YCombinator’s guide to making the most of vibe coding: https://t.co/6SLLD2mm6r
Vibe coding getting gets more powerful by the day With one prompt you can - design a front-end - implement auth - create a editor - create and connect to a database You still can’t replace real developers but you can easily create simple and usable apps Companies can build simple apps for collaboration, tracking and communication
Vibe code is legacy code @karpathy coined vibe coding as a kind of AI-assisted coding where you "forget that the code even exists" We already have a phrase for code that nobody understands: legacy code Legacy code is universally despised, and for good reason. But why? You have the code, right? Can't you figure it out from there? Wrong. Code that nobody understands is tech debt. It takes a lot of time to understand code enough to debug it, let alone introduce new features without also introducing bugs Programming is fundamentally theory building, not producing lines of code. This is why we make fun of business people who try to measure developer productivity in lines of code When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It's only legacy code if you have to maintain it! I vibe code happily all the time. Most often for small apps that I don't need to maintain. I'm a big fan, have at it! Vibe coding is on a spectrum of how much you understand the code. The more you understand, the less you are vibing Simply by being an engineer and asking for a web app with a persistent database, you are already vibing less than than a non-programmer who asks for an "app" without understanding the distinction between a web app and a native app, or how persistent data storage works The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt You'll end up spending a lot of money and getting a large, buggy, legacy code base. If you don't understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card At Val Town, we built Townie, an AI assistant that agnatically reads & writes code, runs it, views the logs, and keeps iterating until it's done. It's is an awesome tool for vibe coding. I heartily recommend it to folks who understand these tradeoffs. I use it to vibe code sometimes. Other times I keep in on a tight leash as it makes surgical edits to a project I care about If you know any non-programmers spending thousands of dollars vibe coding their billion dollar app idea today, warn them that vibe coding is not going to get them where they want to go. They're going to have to learn to use their human eyes to read the code 😱, and that sometimes it's easier to start over with building a well-written code base from scratch than to fix a legacy one that nobody understands
NON-TECHIES AND VIBE CODING LIMITS Non-techies should understand LLM limitations before building apps and agents Here is what AI can do today if you can’t code - write sql queries for you - build RAG chatbots - simple apps and websites - agents that can do research, scrape the web and respond to emails That’s about it! It’s much harder to get AI to do something more complex without knowing any code
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.