Vibe Coding
Updated 2026-04-09
A term coined by Andrej Karpathy that went viral in late 2024: programming through intention rather than explicit syntax. You explain to the LLM what you want to build, including architecture, behavior, and UI, and the LLM writes the code. The human navigates, corrects, and decides, but does much less typing.
“I vibe code products with twitter :D” — Andrej Karpathy
The joke is serious. Karpathy uses Twitter as a public test bed for ideas. Community feedback shapes the direction, and the LLM does the building. The line between product development and public thinking becomes blurry.
What It Means
Traditional coding assumes that you know syntax, know libraries, and can debug errors directly. Vibe Coding shifts the bottleneck from implementation skill to clarity of intention. You need to be able to state what you want, not necessarily every step of how to implement it.
That is not actually simpler. Clear intent is often harder than writing code. People who have never programmed often struggle to be precise enough. People who can already program use vibe coding as a multiplier.
Connection to LLM Knowledge Base
Karpathy describes the same pattern for knowledge work in LLM Knowledge Base. Not just code, but knowledge itself gets compiled, maintained, and extended by LLMs while the human sets direction and constraints.
“I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki.” — Andrej Karpathy