What even is vibe coding?

Someone asked me the other day what I've been up to, and I fumbled the answer. "I'm building apps," I said. Then I backpedaled. "Well, I'm not really building them. The AI is. I'm just... telling it what I want."

Turns out there's a name for that. It's called vibe coding.

The term was coined in early 2025 by Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher who's been around this stuff a long time. He described it as coding where you "fully give in to the vibes" — you talk to the AI in plain English, describe what you want, look at what it makes, react to it, and keep going. You're not writing code. You're guiding by feel.

That's me. That's this whole blog.

I'm 50. I have never written a line of code in my life. I don't know what a function is. I couldn't tell you the difference between a database and a spreadsheet if you paid me. But I've got ideas, I've got opinions about how things should feel, and I've got the patience to say "no, not like that, more like this" about four hundred times in a row until something clicks.

That's the whole job now. That's vibe coding.

The part nobody tells you is that it's not magic. The AI doesn't read your mind. It reads your words, and if your words are vague, you get vague back. So you learn to describe things better. You learn to notice when something feels off, even if you can't explain why. You learn that "I hate this" is a valid piece of feedback and the AI will actually try to fix it.

You also learn to sit with a lot of frustration, because the AI will confidently do the wrong thing, and then confidently do the wrong thing again, and you'll want to throw your laptop across the room. That's part of the vibe too, apparently.

So when you read the rest of this blog and I'm talking about phantom $124,000 gains, or a login screen that made people wait 49 seconds, or a product image that just refused to show up — that's what vibe coding looks like from the inside. Not a person typing code. A person and a machine, arguing politely, trying to make something real.

I think that's worth writing down.