Guide: The Chaotic Evolution of “Vibe Coding”

SiliconSnark is expanding! In addition to our usual satirical swipes at tech news, we’re launching a series of fun but actually useful guides on the most important (and occasionally ridiculous) tech trends of our time. Think of it as your snarky friend explaining things over drinks—minus the hangover. First up: vibe coding, the chaotic-good, AI-fueled future of software development that’s equal parts meme and movement.

What Is Vibe Coding, Anyway?

“Vibe coding” sounds like something a DJ might do with Python scripts at a rave, but fear not – it’s (mostly) about programming. The term vibe coding was coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy to describe a new way of building software: you describe what you want, let AI write the code, and just go with the flow​

In Karpathy’s own words, vibe coding is “giving into the vibes, embrac[ing] exponentials, and forget[ting] that code even exists.” In other words, it’s coding without manually coding – trusting an AI co-pilot to handle the syntax and heavy lifting while you ride the creative wave.

According to the Lovable.dev community (which proudly popularized the term), “vibe coding is coding where you fully trust AI and don’t even read the code and just follow the vibes.”​

If that sounds a bit mystical, well, it kind of is. Instead of poring over every semicolon and bracket, vibe coders act more like product idea chefs: they toss in plain-language descriptions of features or fixes, and the AI magically serves up working code. You want a social media dashboard? Just say so – the AI will whip up the SQL queries and API calls. You need a login system? Describe it, and boom – code appears. The vibe coder’s job is to steer by describing goals, maybe tweak a thing or two, and otherwise trust the process. It’s a wild departure from traditional programming, where developers meticulously craft each line.

So is vibe coding basically the lazy way out? Depends who you ask. Fans argue it democratizes development: “It lets anyone – not just developers – build software, speeds up the whole process, and makes iterating on ideas easier than ever.”​

Why slog through boilerplate when an AI can handle it? Skeptics, on the other hand, clutch their Perl-camel mugs in horror, worrying about code quality, security, and the sanity of not actually seeing the code. (If you’re imagining a grumpy senior engineer muttering “kids these days, not even reading the diff,” you’re not alone.) Vibe coding’s disregard for rigorous review does raise eyebrows in serious circles. Yet, even cynics admit the productivity gains are real. In a recent Lovable x Supabase livestream demo, a team “built a complete event management app in just over an hour” with vibe-driven development – no manual coding, just natural language commands guiding the AI​. Sure, it was a simple app, but that kind of speed is hard to ignore.

At its core, vibe coding flips the script of software development. It says don’t sweat the small stuff (that’s the AI’s job); focus on the big idea and the user experience. It values improvisation and “chaotic good” creativity over meticulous planning. If traditional coding is a classical music composition – precise, planned, following a score – vibe coding is jazz. 🎷 You start with a theme and then riff with the AI, seeing where the joint improvisation takes you. Sometimes you hit a wrong note (the AI writes a bug) and you nudge it back on track with another prompt. Sometimes you find a brilliant fill you wouldn’t have coded yourself. It’s a dance between human and machine, guided by vibes rather than strict rules.

When Code Got Weird: Cultural Roots of the Vibe

Like any trend, vibe coding didn’t emerge from a vacuum. Its free-spirited approach has deep roots in programming culture – pockets of resistance that have long thumbed their noses at stuffy software formalism. Before we had GPT-4 churning out React components on command, we had generations of weird and wonderful coders doing things “for the lulz,” for art, or simply for the vibe. Consider this the family tree of vibe coding’s ethos:

• HyperCard (1987): Apple’s HyperCard was basically vibe coding on a floppy disk. It let users build interactive “stacks” of cards with buttons and scripts using plain English commands – “programming for the rest of us,” as one admirer put it. If you could dream up an app, you could make it in HyperCard​ without a CS degree. People created everything from simple address books to psychedelic art and games, all through an accessible interface that “made it possible for people to do things they wouldn’t have ever thought of doing... without a lot of heavy-duty programming.”​ The vibe was experimental and inclusive, much like today’s no-code/AI tools promise.
• Geocities, MySpace & Tumblr (1990s–2000s): Early personal web pages were a hot mess of glitter GIFs, auto-playing MIDI tunes, and mind-melting HTML hacks. And that was the point. These platforms empowered everyday folks (teenagers, hobbyists, anyone with an internet connection) to tweak code and make a space that screamed “ME”. Who cares if the CSS was chaotic or the JavaScript broke on IE6? It was creative self-expression in pure HTML form. Tumblr in particular fostered a culture of custom themes where users shared and remixed code like zines. It wasn’t professional web development, it was digital scrapbooking with <div> tags – an aesthetic playground. The Indie Web movement continues this tradition today, reviving a “wild web” of personal sites that prioritize “creativity... design, decorate and graffiti digital spaces” over polish​. In those corners of the net, “the Internet is fun – a playground that’s free to explore and enjoy.”​ That’s 100% vibe.
• Processing & Creative Coding (2001+): In the artsy coding realm, Processing arrived as a Java-based “software sketchbook” for visual artists​. Its goal: teach people to code in the context of visual arts, not in a vacuum of algorithms. This spawned a whole creative coding community where the measure of success wasn’t an IPO or enterprise scale – it was the wow factor of an animated generative artwork. Code became a medium for expression. From Processing and OpenFrameworks to p5.js and Three.js, creative coders built mesmerizing visuals, interactive poems, and bizarre web toys. Ever seen those hypnotic particle simulations or interactive graffiti pages online? That’s creative coding in action – arguably vibe coding’s artsy cousin. The code might be messy under the hood, but the end result can feel like magic.
• Weird Twitter & Code Jesters (2010s): Not all code is meant to ship; some is meant to make you spit out your coffee. On “weird Twitter” and forums like r/ProgrammerHumor, developers turned code into comedy. They’d share intentionally ludicrous snippets (e.g. an AI naming function called function doTheThing(){ return 42; } // YOLO) or write satirical “whiteboard interview” solutions that gradually devolved into insanity. The meme-ification of coding – think jokes about writing a program to calculate how many tacos you can eat, or absurd pseudocode like while(true){ procrastinate(); } – created a subculture where amusement was the goal, not efficiency. This ethos bleeds into vibe coding: it’s okay if the code is a bit bonkers as long as the end result vibes and everyone’s having fun.
• Glitch & CodePen (2010s): Fast forward to more recent years, and platforms like Glitch (formerly Fog Creek) and CodePen carried the torch of playful development. Glitch, in particular, branded itself as “the friendly community where anyone can build the web… evolving developer tools into creative and expressive tools that people of any skill level can use.”​The site literally encouraged remixing apps in real time and showed friendly cartoon avatars (yes, unicorns and emojis were common). Likewise, CodePen became the go-to playground for front-end devs to show off crazy CSS art, experimental UI, and “one div” challenges. These communities said “Hey, coding can be a form of art and collaboration, not just engineering.” You’d find everything from a CSS-only Pokémon to an absurd 8-bit game jam built in a single <canvas> tag. That vibe of curiosity and low-stakes experimentation set the stage for something like vibe coding to be embraced – it’s the idea that making something trumps perfection.
• README-Driven & Chaotic Good Dev (always): Among open-source hackers, there’s a semi-joking concept called README-driven development, where you write the project README first – essentially dreaming up the vibe of your software before actually coding it. It flips the normal process: imagine it, describe it, then implement. Sound familiar? It’s basically vibe coding without the AI. Some devs would pen fantastical README stories (“This library will solve world hunger and play smooth jazz while doing it”) as a motivating vision, then try to make it real. Even if done tongue-in-cheek, it reinforces the idea that code should serve the idea, not the other way around. Vibe coding just takes it to the next level by having the AI fill in the implementation while you stick to your high-level vision (the vibe). It’s chaotic-good coding: the plan might be loose and the methods unorthodox, but somehow, it comes together in the end.

These predecessors all share a common spirit: programming as a creative act and sometimes an act of rebellion. They set the cultural soil for vibe coding to sprout. By the time Karpathy’s vibe coding tweet went viral in 2025, developers were already primed to embrace a more whimsical, seat-of-the-pants approach – especially one turbocharged by AI assistance.

Vibes vs. Enterprise: When Hackers Meet the Suits

It wouldn’t be a proper saga without a culture clash. On one side, picture the serious programmers: enterprise software engineers in cozy offices (or Zoom grids), armed with style guides, unit tests, and a deep fear of anything that isn’t backward-compatible. Their world runs on JIRA tickets, code review checklists, and coffee as black as their dark mode IDE theme. These are the folks who treat coding like a craft and a science – and who view errors as existential failures to be eliminated by rigorous process. On the other side, the vibe coders stride in wearing tie-dye t-shirts (metaphorically at least), blasting vaporwave music, and saying things like, “What if we just wing it and see what happens?” 😎

Let’s draw a cheeky comparison:

• The Enterprise “Proper” Coder: Spends 30 minutes debating the correct linting rules for bracket spacing. Attends meetings about “leveraging synergy in microservices.” Has nightmares about rogue NULL pointers. Prepares meticulously for whiteboard interviews by practicing binary tree traversals. Their Git commit messages read like “feat: implement OAuth2 client credentials flow per RFC-6749 section 4.4.” They aspire to clean code and 99.999% uptime. Basically, coding as serious business™.
• The Vibe Coder: Spends 30 minutes finding the perfect GIF to embed in a pull request comment. Attends zero meetings if they can help it, preferring a good lo-fi beats playlist and a comfy couch. Has nightmares about being forced to write Java boilerplate by hand. Prepares for “interviews” by building something funky to show off (or maybe just by manifesting good vibes). Their commit messages read like “yolo push – it works (I think) 🎉.” They aspire to cool output and 100% fun. Basically, coding as an adventure.

It’s no surprise these two cultures sometimes side-eye each other. The vibe coder looks at corporate codebases and sees a lot of tedious grind. (One writer quipped that programming too often means enduring “an endless parade of tedious obstacles.”​

The enterprise dev looks at vibe coding and sees reckless abandon – a path to late-night production outages and spaghetti code galore. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. Even vibe coders know there’s a time to buckle down and fix that gnarly bug, and even the stiffest enterprise dev likely got into coding because it used to be fun before deadlines and legacy systems sucked the soul out of it.

Vibe coding, in a way, is a reaction to the industrialization of software development. Tech companies spent decades turning coding into a highly managed, assembly-line process – think agile sprints, scrums, continuous integration. Efficient? Sure. Exciting? Debatable. As one disillusioned coder confessed, “Programming without the designing part just feels like data entry to me. There’s nothing clever, or creative, or interesting about it.”​

That sentiment is more common than you’d think, and it captures why vibe coding can feel like a breath of fresh air. It brings playfulness back to programming, thumbing its nose at the notion that every line of code must be enterprise-grade and mission-critical.

Imagine a vibe coder in a typical whiteboard interview at Big Tech Co.: Interviewer: “Please invert this binary tree.” Vibe Coder: pulls out phone, opens AI assistant “Sure, let me just ask my buddy ChatGPT….” 😱 Interviewer: (clutches pearls, calls security). Okay, maybe that scenario hasn’t happened (yet). But it highlights the philosophical divide. Vibe coding challenges the idea that a “real programmer” must personally craft every algorithm from scratch. Why not collaborate with an AI and focus on the creative bits? Why not treat coding like a conversation rather than a typed soliloquy?

To be fair, even vibe coders acknowledge that at some point, somebody’s got to ensure the code is actually good. The Lovable.dev team often talks about making AI-generated code “more reliable, secure, and production-ready.”​

The vibe might get you to a working prototype at warp speed, but cleaning up after the party – writing tests, tightening security – is still work. In that sense, vibe coding isn’t a total rejection of software engineering rigor; it just postpones it until after the creative rush. It’s like scribbling a story idea in crayon first, then later editing the draft for grammar. The serious coders might still do a lot of the polishing, but vibe coding proves that the initial creation phase can be a lot more freeform than we thought.

Why Vibe Coding Now? (Burnout, Bohemia, and Post-Pandemic Vibes)

It’s 2025, we’re all a little exhausted, and frankly the world could use a bit of whimsy. The timing of vibe coding’s rise is no accident. Several factors converged to make this playful, AI-infused approach catch fire now:

• Burnout Backlash: After years of crunching, endless Zoom meetings, and pandemic-era overwork, developers are tired. The Great Resignation didn’t skip tech – plenty of coders peaced out from high-stress jobs. Those who stayed often grappled with feeling like code monkeys churning out Jira tickets. Vibe coding, with its devil-may-care attitude, is almost therapeutic by comparison. It says: “Let’s stop grinding for a sec and just play with tech.” It’s coding as a form of relief and rediscovery. Instead of being another cog in a big system, vibe coding lets you feel like an artist or a mad scientist again, even if just for a weekend side project. When you have an AI eager to pair-program 24/7 without complaining, why not lean into that and rediscover some joy? Many devs did just that, and found it rekindled their love for making cool stuff.
• Aesthetics as Resistance: There’s a whiff of rebellion in vibe coding’s popularity. The tech industry of the late 2010s and early 2020s got super serious – everything had to “scale,” every app had to look and feel the same (hello, material design and bootstrap blandness), and innovation often meant optimizing ad clicks. Yawn. In response, a subsection of developers and designers started embracing more distinctive, quirky styles – from the brutalist web design resurgence (intentionally rough, throwback websites) to neon-soaked vaporwave UIs. Vibe coding slots right into this aesthetic resistance. It’s a rejection of boring software monoculture. If enterprise coding is all gray suits, vibe coding is a closet full of rainbow onesies. By prioritizing fun and experimentation, it implicitly pushes back on the idea that software must always be serious business. The vibe is the message: tech can be weird, artsy, and personal. And frankly, that message resonates with a generation that watched social media and big tech become more dystopian by the day. Coding needed its punk rock moment, and vibe coding is part of that – a little chaotic good to disrupt the buttoned-up norms.
• Indie Maker Resurgence: Hand-in-hand with the above, we’ve seen an indie hacker and small creator renaissance. Whether it’s people launching tiny apps, personal websites, or creative tools, there’s renewed energy around making stuff for the heck of it. Platforms like Itch.io (for indie games) or Product Hunt (for side project launches) thrived as folks built things outside of giant corporations. Vibe coding supercharges the indie ethos: one person with a cool idea can potentially build a prototype in a day using AI helpers, whereas before they might get bogged down in boilerplate for a week. This means more crazy ideas see the light of day. The lower the effort to create, the more likely someone will attempt that funky project – leading to a Cambrian explosion of indie experiments. In a way, vibe coding is gasoline on the fire of the indie dev comeback. It’s no wonder communities like Lovable.dev are community first, with people sharing their vibe-coded creations and war stories. It feels collaborative and anti-establishment, echoing the open-source and maker cultures that have always been about passion over profit.
• AI Everywhere (and the GPT-4 Effect): Of course, we can’t ignore the elephant (Transformer) in the room: AI tech got really good, really fast. When GPT-3 and GPT-4 showed they could crank out code that (mostly) works, the idea of vibe coding moved from joke to reality. Even Karpathy’s viral tweet in early 2025 was propelled by shock at how far AI coding had come. As he noted, sometimes you just describe what you want and “it mostly works”​– a statement that would have sounded like sci-fi just a few years prior. This sudden capability jump created a bit of FOMO and excitement. Early adopters tried vibe coding out of curiosity (“Can I really build an app by just describing it?”), and many were pleasantly surprised. The tech industry loves its hype cycles, and AI-assisted anything was hot. “Vibe coding” became a banner to rally under – it captured the imagination as a folksy term for this paradigm shift. Behind the memes and tongue-in-cheek name lies a serious potential: maybe in the future, coding will be mostly telling an AI what we want. Vibe coding might be a preview of that future, wrapped in a fun package. As one tech columnist noted, “vibe coding... lies a powerful paradigm shift”, hinting that it could “unlock” new levels of productivity and accessibility in software​​. In other words, what starts as a trendy meme can end up mainstream if it proves effective. And nothing convinces people faster than seeing an AI complete in minutes a task that would have taken them hours. The vibes are contagious.

In short, vibe coding took off because we needed it. We needed the laughter, the experimentation, the reminder that coding can be more than leetCode grind and sprint backlogs. It arrived at the intersection of burnout and innovation – offering a playful antidote to serious times, powered by some seriously cool technology.

The Vibe Lives On (Conclusion)

Will vibe coding still be around in 5 or 10 years? Who knows. Perhaps the phrase will fade once AI-assisted development becomes just “normal coding.” Or maybe it’ll spawn even wilder offshoots (vibe-driven design, anyone?). What’s clear is that the spirit behind vibe coding – that mischievous, creative, human spirit – is anything but new, and it’s not going away. It’s the same spirit that drove hackers in the ’80s to create HyperCard stacks and demoscene graphics just for the thrill, that inspired artists to code mesmerizing patterns in Processing, and that led teenagers to turn their Tumblr pages into glitter-bombed expressions of self. Vibe coding is simply the latest incarnation, supercharged by AI and a bit of post-modern snark.

As the Lovable.dev team mused, vibe coding is “more than just a buzzword – it’s a real transformation in how we build software.”​

They might be talking about AI tools, but on a cultural level it’s also a transformation back toward something – toward fun, accessibility, and *dang it, a little chaos in our code. And that’s worth celebrating.

So here’s to the vibe coders: the prompt cowboys, the README dreamers, the ones who code like nobody’s watching (and if the AI is watching, they just high-five it and keep going). In a tech world that can often feel like a sterile cubicle, they’re hanging up disco balls in the data center and throwing a party in the commit history. The next time you find yourself stuck on a gnarly bug or bored by a routine task, maybe take a page from their book – take a breath, feel the vibe, and code with a smile. Who knows? You might just build something wonderful (or weird, or wonderfully weird). And even if not, at least you’ll have a good story to tell. After all, in vibe coding as in life, it’s about the journey – and the vibes – as much as the destination.