Vibe Coding: What It Is, Where It Comes From, and What It Can Really Do

On February 2, 2025, Andrej Karpathy — former Tesla AI chief and OpenAI co-founder — wrote a short post on X. He described a new way of programming where you "fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponential growth, and forget that code even exists." He called it Vibe Coding.

Since then, the term is everywhere. Collins Dictionary named it Word of the Year 2025. Y Combinator reported that a quarter of their W25 batch has apps that are 95 percent AI-generated. Millions of people worldwide are building software without ever writing a line of code.

But what exactly is Vibe Coding? And — more importantly — what can it really do?

What Is Vibe Coding?

With Vibe Coding, you describe in natural language what you want your software to do. An AI model — such as Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini — writes the code. You test whether it works. If not, you describe the problem, and the AI corrects it.

The key difference: you don't need to understand the code. You don't need to know what a variable is, how a database works, or what an API endpoint does. You describe your goal, the AI delivers — and you decide whether the result is good enough.

Karpathy's original quote:

"There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding.' You fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists."

Tools like Cursor, Bolt, Lovable, or Replit Agent make exactly this possible. They take natural language input and produce working applications — often in minutes rather than days.

What Can Vibe Coding Do Well?

For certain scenarios, Vibe Coding is a genuine revolution:

Prototypes and MVPs

If you want to test a business idea, you can build a working prototype in just a few hours. No developer needed, no budget for a tech team. Especially for founders and small teams, this is an enormous advantage.

Internal Tools

A simple dashboard, a form, a small automation script — for tasks like these, you no longer need a developer. The AI writes the code; you describe what you need.

Learning and Experimenting

Anyone who wants to understand how software works can experiment and learn with Vibe Coding. The barrier to entry has never been lower.

Creative Projects

Personal websites, small games, art projects — wherever perfection doesn't matter, Vibe Coding is perfectly suited.

Where Vibe Coding Hits Its Limits

The enthusiasm is real. But reality looks different — at least when it comes to professional software.

Security

An analysis of Lovable projects showed: out of 1,645 publicly accessible apps, 170 had critical security vulnerabilities — open database access, exposed API keys, missing authentication. If you don't understand the code, you can't identify security problems.

Quality

CodeRabbit analyzed hundreds of thousands of pull requests and found: AI-generated code has 1.7 times more major issues and 2.74 times more security vulnerabilities than human-written code.

Maintenance

Software lives. It needs to be updated, repaired, and extended. If no one on the team understands the code, every change becomes a risk. The code becomes a black box that no one wants to open.

Scaling

Building a prototype with Vibe Coding is easy. But what happens when 10,000 users access it simultaneously? When the database grows? When different systems need to be integrated? This requires architectural knowledge that no AI model can provide alone.

Debugging

A METR study found that experienced developers using AI tools were actually 19 percent slower on complex tasks than without them. The reason: they spent more time debugging faulty AI code than they would have spent writing it themselves.

What Experts Say

Opinions are divided:

Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, uses AI tools himself — but emphasizes that they fail at complex, hardware-level tasks. AI handles standard code well, but becomes problematic in edge cases.

Andrew Ng, Stanford professor and AI pioneer, warned: "Vibe Coding is great for learning and prototypes. But deploying code to production that no one understands is not a good idea."

Simon Willison, developer and AI expert, made an important distinction: Vibe Coding is when you don't read the code. Using AI as a tool while understanding and controlling the code — that's not vibes, it's professional AI-assisted development.

The "Vibe Coding Hangover"

Fast Company coined the term "Vibe Coding Hangover" in 2025 for a phenomenon that's becoming increasingly common: companies and founders build enthusiastically with AI tools — and realize weeks later that their code isn't maintainable, isn't secure, and doesn't scale.

The first version comes together quickly. But the second, third, fourth version — the updates, bugfixes, and extensions — become a nightmare because nobody truly understands the code.

Vibe Coding vs. AI-Assisted Development

There's an important distinction that's often overlooked:

	Vibe Coding	AI-Assisted Development
Who writes the code?	AI alone	AI + experienced developer
Code understanding	Not required	Complete
Quality control	Does it work? Done.	Code review, tests, architecture
Security	Uncontrolled	Verified and secured
Maintainability	Low	High
Suitable for	Prototypes, learning	Production systems

Our Approach at StudioMeyer

We use AI intensively — but we don't do Vibe Coding. Every line of code is understood, reviewed, and tested. AI is our tool, not our replacement.

What this means in practice:

• AI writes the first draft — a human reviews and corrects it
• Automated tests ensure quality
• Code reviews make sure nothing goes to production that nobody understands
• Architectural knowledge comes from developers, not prompts

The result: the speed of AI development — without the risks of Vibe Coding.

Conclusion

Vibe Coding has its place. It makes software development accessible to people who've never programmed. It accelerates prototypes and lowers barriers to entry.

But for professional software — which needs to be secure, maintainable, and scalable — "vibes" aren't enough. That requires expertise, architectural understanding, and the right combination of human and machine.

Want to use AI for your business — properly and securely? Talk to us about an AI server that delivers more than vibes.

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Originally published on studiomeyer.io. StudioMeyer is an AI-first digital studio building premium websites and intelligent automation for businesses.