What is Vibe Coding?
The term “vibe coding” was first used by Andrej Karpathy, former Director of AI at Tesla and co-founder of OpenAI, in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on February 2, 2025.
In his post, Karpathy described how, during a weekend project using tools like Cursor Composer, he barely interacted with the code directly: he dictated simple instructions to an AI model, accepted suggestions without rveviewing diffs, and used bugs as opportunities to refine features. This experience marked a clear departure from traditional development methods and served as the foundation for what is now known as vibe coding.
Approach and Fundamentals
Vibe Coding is a development style that prioritizes fluency, immediacy, and intuition over formal processes or rigid methodologies. While it is not a standardized technique or a software architecture, it represents a pragmatic and spontaneous approach to building software, particularly useful during prototyping phases, idea exploration, and iterative design.
Key Principles
- Flow-first
The goal is to enter and maintain a state of flow, avoiding interruptions such as unnecessary documentation, imposed conventions, or complex setups. The idea is to reduce context switching and maximize cognitive focus. - Rapid Iteration
Development cycles are short, with immediate feedback. Tools like hot reload, live preview, or REPL environments allow ideas to be validated in real time. - Code Sketching
Code is written like a sketch,functional, but not final. The priority is capturing the intent rather than optimizing. Refactoring is a natural part of the flow. - No Fear of Breaking Things
The process is exploratory. Developers test freely without worrying about writing perfect code. The goal is to understand how a feature should behave, rather than producing polished output from the start. - Flexible and Expressive Stack
Languages with low friction such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, or Lua are commonly used, alongside modern tools like React, Svelte, Tailwind, Vite, or Storybook, which promote visual immediacy and rapid iteration.
Advantages of the Approach
Vibe coding offers major benefits for developers who value speed, creativity, and functional focus. It enables ideas to be turned into working prototypes in minutes, without the overhead of upfront design, strict typing, or formal structure.
This approach fosters developer flow, reducing interruptions like code reviews, mandatory tests, or heavy configuration. It lowers cognitive load by minimizing rules, validations, and rigid conventions, freeing up mental capacity to focus on core logic.
It also integrates naturally with AI tools like copilots or code assistants, further accelerating the development pace.
Vibe coding helps overcome perfectionism paralysis: it encourages developers to move forward with functional solutions and leave optimization for later. It’s especially useful for personal projects, proofs of concept (POCs), and experimental environments; where validating an idea is more important than scaling it right away.
Not Everything That Vibes Is Gold
While vibe coding is a powerful tool, it’s not suitable as the sole approach for serious or large-scale projects. Some promote the misleading idea that you don’t need to know how to code to build professional applications, this is a mistake, if not a scam.
In professional environments, vibe coding is excellent for prototyping, but must be followed by structured work: refactoring, technical validation, architectural design, and thorough testing.
Relying entirely on AI to build your project’s logic leads to a lack of visibility over what is being built, why it’s being built, and when things happen. This disconnect can quickly become problematic: if you don’t understand how the system works, maintaining and evolving the code becomes unsustainable. As the AI-generated codebase grows, maintaining it gets harder, especially due to model context limits and the risk of hallucinations or inconsistencies.
Conclusion
Vibe coding is a valuable approach for building software with agility and creativity. It’s especially useful in early-stage projects or when validating ideas, helping developers focus on the what (functionality) while postponing the how (detailed implementation).
However, like any tool, it must be used wisely. It doesn’t replace technical understanding or human judgment. The key is knowing when to apply it, and when to switch to more structured approaches. Because at the end of the day, it’s still up to the developer to know the difference between a nail and a screw.
At Folder IT, we help tech teams turn ideas into scalable products—fast. Whether you’re experimenting with AI-assisted development or building your next production-grade app, our experts are here to support you. Contact us to explore how we can accelerate your roadmap.
