Vibe Coding: A Review

It was the tweet (xeet) that launched a thousand vibes-based projects. Early in February, Andrej Karpathy posted about how good AI-assisted coding had gotten.

The interesting thing about this kind of vibe-based coding is that his flow – using SuperWhisper and Cursor means that he is basically interacting with his codebase at a high level. He is only testing the code after making iterations on a conceptual level with prompts. It is right if it does what he wants when he tests, even without looking at source.

Now, my take on this after using Cursor is that this is possible, but it doesn’t feel there *yet* based off of my preferred flow.

I think vibe based coding is possible for small projects but… (and good lord, I wouldn’t consider accepting these diffs into a project before even *reading* them) the larger the context, the more recent the libraries that it is importing – the more likely Cursor is to mess up, even with running a beast of a model like Sonnet 3.7.

It has been a common experience for me to be able to quickly accept changes from Cursor if I’m making small changes – or changes that are essentially templated off of other architectural patterns, but it is difficult to do this successfully with larger edits. The larger the codebase gets – the more difficult it becomes in general as well.

What I am saying is – I think that AI assisted coding and agents are incredible tools but the vibes are not quite there yet for vibe coding as a style of yoloing diffs.

However, as a form of increasing motivation – understanding and exploration the vibes are excellent. This is using vibe coding as a way to quickly create small prototypes for modular features, new projects, or playing around.

Anyway, there are many projects being generated in this style of coding right now, the most famous being https://fly.pieter.com/ – which was created by levelsio through a session of vibe coding.

The final note that I’ll leave the reader here is that I believe the one throughline I’ve seen with vibe coding is that the best results with this come from people who have built an excellent baseline of Engineering skill before picking up vibe coding. Your Engineering skills will transfer, and in fact, are required for the best results.

Happy vibing!