Vibe Coding: The Era Where Everyone Is a Programmer Is Really Here
One afternoon, I said something to my terminal window: "Help me build a bilingual personal website in Chinese and English, with animations powered by a physics engine."
Then I hit Enter.
I know nothing about frontend development. I've never written React, and Next.js routing configuration is completely foreign to me. But that same afternoon, the website you're looking at right now—75 TypeScript files, 29 React components, a draggable tag wall built with the Matter.js physics engine, and an AI chat assistant connected to a large language model—was simply "talked" into existence.
All the code was written by Claude Code. I didn't write a single word.
This is called vibe coding. A year ago, most people hadn't even heard the term.
A Word, A Movement
On February 2, 2025, Andrej Karpathy casually posted a tweet on X:
"I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works."
He called this new way of programming vibe coding. You no longer write code line by line; instead, you tell the AI what you want in everyday language, then watch it make things happen. When you hit an error, you throw the error message at it, and it usually gets fixed. The codebase grows to a size you can't possibly read through, and you simply stop looking.
Karpathy himself said it was just a "shower thought" posted casually. But it articulated something many people were already doing without knowing what to call it.
You probably noticed what happened next—Collins Dictionary selected vibe coding as its 2025 Word of the Year, and Google searches for the term skyrocketed by 6,700%. A casual tweet became the name of a movement.
Put simply, vibe coding boils down to one sentence: you don't need to understand code; you just need to be able to clearly describe what you want.
From Completion to Conversation: Three Leaps in AI Programming
AI helping people write code isn't new. But the past few years have seen three completely distinct leaps. Understanding the differences between them is key to grasping what's actually new about vibe coding.
The first step was code completion. When GitHub launched Copilot in 2021, programmers got excited—it could guess what you were going to write next based on your half-finished code. Much like predictive text on your phone, it made typing faster, but you still had to know what to type. Non-programmers staring at Copilot were just as lost as before.
The second step was code generation. After ChatGPT took off in 2023, you could describe a requirement in Chinese and get a block of code back. This was a huge step up from Copilot, but you still had to understand that code, know where to put it, and fix bugs yourself. It was like having a fast but somewhat unreliable intern—helpful, but you had to watch them closely.
The third step is vibe coding. Starting in early 2025, tools like Claude Code and Cursor can read your entire project codebase, create files, modify files, run tests, fix bugs, and even find workarounds when they hit roadblocks. You go from being the person writing code to the person making requests. Put bluntly, you become the product manager, and the AI becomes the engineering team.
The difference here isn't one of degree; it's one of kind. From "AI helps you write code" to "you tell the AI what you want," there's a threshold that has been crossed. As I discussed in my previous article, AI isn't the next Copilot—it's a category leap.
The Numbers Don't Lie
Data from last winter's Y Combinator batch surprised a lot of people. YC CEO Garry Tan said that for 25% of startups in that cohort, 95% of their code was AI-generated.
YC is a top-tier global startup incubator. These are people seriously raising funding and shipping products.
Around the same time, Stack Overflow's developer survey showed that 84% of programmers use AI tools in their daily work. At LlamaCon, Nadella said that 20% to 30% of the code in Microsoft's own repositories is AI-written.
Jensen Huang put it in a way that I think captures this most accurately:
"Everyone is a programmer. The new programming language is called human language."
Two years ago, that sounded like a vision. In hindsight, it's more like a plain description of what's already happening.
My Own Experiment
Back to the website I mentioned at the beginning. Honestly, when I decided to build it, I had little confidence it would work.
The tech stack looks intimidating on paper: Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript strict mode, Tailwind CSS v4, Velite + MDX content system, Matter.js physics engine. But I didn't understand any of these—not being modest, I genuinely had no clue.
All I did was talk to Claude Code. It wrote all the code; I didn't touch a single character.
The particle animation on the homepage—those floating lights that follow your cursor when you refresh—runs on 187 lines of Canvas rendering code, handling device pixel ratio adaptation, dark mode switching, and even detecting the user's "reduced motion" preference. I know nothing about Canvas programming, but I could describe the visual effect I wanted to the AI and iterate round after round.
The draggable physics tag wall is even more interesting. Under the hood it runs on the Matter.js physics engine, where every tag has gravity, friction, and restitution, and tags that fall off-screen automatically bounce back. Two hundred sixty-two lines of code, not one of them typed by me—all written by Claude Code. Yet every single line exists because I said something like, "If a tag falls off, it should bounce back."
Then there's the AI chat assistant—a full 299-line chat interface connected to a large language model API, supporting streaming output, with a WeChat-style UI in Chinese environments and a WhatsApp-style UI in English ones.
Domain configuration, DNS setup, Vercel deployment—all things I completely didn't understand—were also handled by Claude. I didn't even know what DNS was; I just watched Claude click around in the browser and then tell me, "Done."
The whole project took one afternoon. If I had to learn these tech stacks from scratch and write it myself, I never would have started, because I wouldn't have known where to begin.
I'm not watching this transformation from the sidelines. I'm using it to build houses—without laying a single brick myself.
But—
If I only wrote about the good stuff up to this point, this post would turn into sponsored content. It's not that simple.
In July 2025, METR published a rigorous controlled experiment: experienced open-source developers (averaging five years of experience and 1,500 commits) used AI tools to work on their own project development tasks. The result: with AI, these people actually became 19% slower. Even more intriguing, the developers themselves felt the AI made them 20% faster—perception and reality were completely inverted.
Another data point comes from CodeRabbit's year-end 2025 analysis: code with AI involvement had 1.7x the rate of severe issues compared to purely human-written code, and security vulnerabilities were 2.74x higher.
These numbers are real, and there's no point in ignoring them.
But I think they're actually describing two different things. The METR experiment measured "experts doing work they already know well"—ask a race car driver to drive while explaining every turn to the passenger, and of course they'll slow down. But the point of vibe coding was never to make the race car driver faster; it's to let people who could never get on the road in the first place start driving.
As for security vulnerabilities, this shows that AI-written code does need human review before hitting production. But consider this: without vibe coding, many of these projects wouldn't exist at all. The question to ask isn't "Is AI-written code perfect?" but "Is it good enough to build things that were previously impossible?" For personal projects, prototype validation, and internal tools, the answer is obvious. Later, I used the same approach to write 300,000 lines of code in 10 days, then delete all of it—that experience taught me that code is a liability, not an asset.
These problems are real. But the tools are iterating rapidly; shortcomings from six months ago may already be fixed today. The direction is right; the road is still being paved.
Code Is Just the Beginning
If you still think vibe coding is just "making websites without learning to code," you're vastly underestimating it.
Following the logic of my previous article: when AI can convert capital directly into productivity, what is that intermediate conversion mechanism? I believe the answer is code.
The digital world runs on code. Every app on your phone, every website you use, every online payment—all of it is powered by running code. Code is the universal interface through which humans control the digital world.
And vibe coding means AI has mastered that interface.
When AI can write code reliably, it can build software. When it can build software, it can automate almost any digital task—booking flights, managing schedules, analyzing reports, building websites, calling APIs. All of these are essentially variations on "write a program and run it."
This is why AI Agents, which I discussed in my previous post, are so worth watching. For an agent to handle things for you in the digital world, it needs to be able to operate that world. How? By writing code, calling APIs, reading and writing files. Vibe coding gives the agent this capability. Or to put it another way: vibe coding is the interface between you and the AI agent—you express intent in natural language, and the AI turns it into reality with code.
In the previous post, I said that "capital can bypass human labor and convert directly into productivity." Vibe coding is the path around.
Your First Step
If you've read this far, there are probably two voices arguing in your head. One says, "This is so cool," and the other says, "But I can't program."
The good news is that the second voice is describing exactly the problem vibe coding solves. You don't need to know how to program. You just need to be able to speak and type.
I use Claude Code, a terminal-based AI programming tool from Anthropic. Installation takes just one command.
For macOS or Linux users, open your terminal:
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
For Windows users, open PowerShell:
irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex
Once installed, open a terminal in any folder, type claude, and try saying: "Help me write a small BMI calculator."
See what happens.
What you just did would have required a computer science degree five years ago. Three years ago, you would have spent hours digging through Stack Overflow. One year ago, you would have been copying and pasting code snippets from ChatGPT back and forth.
Now you just said a sentence.
The tools will keep getting faster and smarter; that direction won't change. Looking back from five years in the future, 2026 may well be remembered as the year ordinary people started "writing" software in natural language. Rather than looking back with regret then, you might as well try it now. If you want to see more real-world cases, I documented the entire process of talking this official website into existence with Claude Code.
Originally published at https://guanjiawei.ai/en/blog/vibe-coding