I don't know what vibecoding is, and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.

I wouldn't worry too much, no-one seems to be able to agree what it means anyway.

Depending on who you speak to it can be anything from coding only by describing the general idea of what you want, to just being another term for LLM assisted programming.

The strict original definition of vibe coding is it is LLM writing code with the programmer never caring about the code, only caring about the code's runtime output. It is easily the worst way to use LLMs for code, and I think even coining the term was a highly irresponsible and society-damaging move by Karpathy, making me lose much respect for him. This coined definition was taken literally by managers to fire workers.

In truth, for LLM generated code to be maintainable and scalable, it first needs to be speced-out super well by the engineer in collaboration with the LLM, and then the generated code must also be reviewed line-by-line by the engineer.

There is no room for vibe coding in making things that last and don't immediately get hacked.

It’s fine to not know what it is, but what is the rationale for commenting that you don’t know? Why not just look it up? Or don’t, as you’re too afraid to ask.

Here's the tweet where Karpathy coined the term.

tldr; fast throwaway code from a LLM, where the human is just looking at the results and not trying to make maintainable 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.