Andrej, a PhD from Stanford, is not just a prominent AI building block in companies like OpenAI and Tesla. He also runs a highly benevolent educational initiative on YouTube, teaching millions about chatbots and AI.
When he speaks, AI techies listen. Even the New York Times and Business Insider had to take notice.
Vibe coding isn’t a formal sub-discipline of programming, and it will never be. It’s not a concept. It’s a feeling. Programmers have known it even before AI. Andrej finally put a name on it.
When you meditate or have an out-of-body experience, you are fully immersed in your out-of-the-world reality. But when you return to the material world, you can’t describe it in exact words.
Language, however perfect, falls short of describing the entire spectrum of our cognitive experiences. No matter how many words we invent, there are some gray spots that remain undescribed. Adjectives like ethereal, surreal and sublime exist for a reason.
Now, just replace the language in the above example with a programming language, and the result you get is: Vibe coding. Let’s see how it unfolds across various stages of software development.
As coders, we write programming instructions. Console.log and do…while are our ways to tell the machine what we want from it.
As developers, we move up one level of abstraction: We encapsulate. We combine data and functions under umbrellas called objects. We interconnect them, define their lifetimes, and build fully functional systems.
When we build things with chatbots, we move up yet another level of abstraction. We tell LLMs…