A brief history of vibe *ing with AI, and a primer on what it means for work, life and the future
It feels like years ago now, but back in February, lesser-known OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" with his post on X, describing it as coding where you "fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." The term caught fire and suddenly everyone was vibe coding, vibe writing, vibe thinking.
Developers actually started coding with the help of LLMs back in 2021 when Github released Copilot as a developer plugin for code-writing tools like Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code). The plugin was an instant hit, not because it wrote code from prompts, but because it anticipated the code you were writing and could complete the code for you, saving you time. Programmers have long been aware that reinventing the wheel is a mandatory recursive part of coding. But it's often the process of rewriting code that gives you comprehensive understanding, and the ability to fix things when they break. So code completion feels like magic because it looks at the context of the code, then recognizes the start of the pattern, and anticipates the rest with a spooky level of accuracy.
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