What is vibe coding and why does it get so much hate?

Vibe coding has gotten a bad reputation as lazy, AI-driven coding, but that’s not where it came from. What is vibe coding and why does it get so much hate. It’s a more nuanced discussion than you might think.

For the uninitiated, it’s a form of software development that involves using a large language model (LLM) to generate some or all of the code for a project. The term was first coined by Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher who is best known for having led Tesla’s Autopilot Vision program. "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," Karpathy wrote on X in February 2025.

Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good." Since then, LLMs have only gotten better at generating code, and the popularity of vibe coding has grown significantly as a result. But as you might expect, anytime something becomes popular, there’s bound to be backlash too. Proponents of vibe coding argue LLMs democratize software development, allowing anyone to make their own apps.