The hype and risks of vibe coding

and why designers should not head down this path.

There has been a surge of single-prompt, full-stack solutions popping up in the arena of vibe coding. How will design respond to this trend? (image source: Jama)

The rise of vibe coding

Vibe coding is all the rage right now. Sprouting out of a social media post, AI veteran Andrei Karpathy gave his unique perspective on a trending way to code:

There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding,” where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g., Cursor Composer w/Sonnet) are getting scarily good.

Unsurprisingly, social media started lighting up, with many netizens declaring their enthusiasm for making products without a line of code. New York Times columnist Kevin Roose joined in the fun, and even legendary design veteran John Maeda attempted to jazz it up by calling it vibe-sliding, a subset category of automating presentation slides.

Speed and automation

As the scene unfolds, vibe coding almost feels like it’s the startup garages of the 1980s. Why? Because there has…