The Vibe Coding Revolution Is Getting Overhyped

'The word “vibe” has become so ubiquitous that it’s started to lose its meaning. A buzzy new phrase, vibe coding, has gripped the tech industry just a month after it was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and venerated programmer who posted on X that it was “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." In other words, let AI do all the coding for you. Since then, the phrase has popped up everywhere in tech circles — on social media, forums like Hacker News, executive posts on LinkedIn and in Slack channels populated by startup founders in the Y Combinator accelerator in California. “The term is blowing up,” says Chaz Englander, founder of Model ML, which went through the program last year.

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It was once rare to see startups with fewer than 20 people bringing in tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue, but now it’s becoming the norm, says Englander. Little wonder that AI coding startups like Stockholm, Sweden-based Lovable have become the hot new thing among venture capital funds. But let’s not get carried away. Businesses tempted to emulate Salesforce should remember that enterprise-grade code still requires plenty of humans. Vibe coding isn’t the answer to your budgetary problems. For one thing, today’s newest startups are leaner not just because they’re using AI in code creation, but also in sales and customer service. “When our sales team arrives in the morning, there are already between 30 and 50 emails in the outbox,” all generated by AI and awaiting human review, Englander says. And while vibe coding is fine for making prototypes and simple pieces of software, you absolutely can’t build enterprise-grade software just using AI. Anything that requires complex functionality on the back end, or that touches something payment-related, needs the review of experienced programmers in order to work.

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