Earlier this year, former OpenAI exec Andrej Karpathy coined a new term — “vibe coding” — for using artificial intelligence to rapidly develop software using natural language prompts.
But the approach comes with some glaring shortcomings that have gradually come to light, from major cybersecurity problems leading to mass leaking of sensitive personal information to rampant hallucinations that turn vibe-coded projects into a buggy mess that has to be painstakingly fixed by human programmers.
Even Karpathy himself has seemingly fallen out of love with his own creation. His latest project, dubbed Nanochat, is a “minimal, from scratch” interface that strips down a ChatGPT-like experience to its very basics.
“You boot up a cloud [graphics processing unit] box, run a single script and in as little as four hours later you can talk to your own [large language model] in a ChatGPT-like web UI,” he boasted in a recent tweet.
But as it turns out, the project wasn’t the result of AI vibe coding — it was Karpathy himself.
“It’s basically entirely hand-written,” Karpathy wrote in a followup. “I tried to use Claude/Codex agents a few times but they just didn’t work well enough at all and net unhelpful, possibly the repo is too far off the data distribution.”
In other words, even the godfather of vibe coding doesn’t trust the tech enough to use it on his own project.
To be fair, even Karpathy himself never intended for “vibe coding” to replace human developers in the long run.
“Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away,” he wrote in the February tweet in which he first coined the term. “It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing.”
But overrelying on the technique can have disastrous consequences as companies continue to cut costs in favor of investing in AI — regardless of Karpathy’s original intentions.
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