Are These Even The Right Vibes?

It Starts With a Tweet

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 too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper…

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) February 2, 2025

And there it was, named, from a co-founder of OpenAI no less. He doesn’t need an AI to do any coding, surely?

What Are These Vibes, Anyway?

When I wrote my first vibes post, it felt like the right word to describe what I was doing. I had seen it mentioned in a headline when I was scrolling my news feed earlier on in my journey and took it to just really mean using AI-assistance for coding. I felt like that was where I was at, with letting the AI steer on the content of the code while I still didn’t know all the details yet; staying open to the experimentation and just getting something to work.

But looking again at the post it doesn’t seem to fully fit what I am doing, or what I am intending to do with my workflow. I don’t think I am vibe coding in the way that it was originally meant.

The Original Vibe

“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. … I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.”

It’s a freeing approach for throwaway weekend projects where:

• Ask the AI for tiny tweaks you can’t be bothered to find.
• Don’t bother reading diffs.
• Don’t stress over bugs just work around.
• Accept everything and move fast.
• Don’t even try to understand what the code is doing beyond “does it run?”

It’s playful, fast, and perfect for low-stakes experiments that don’t need to be maintained.

My Vibes … Aren’t Quite That

When I started working on my AI-driven gaming agent, I thought I was vibe coding because I wasn’t following traditional engineering rigor. No endless design documents, no peer review, with no formal coding background. Just me, the AI, and a vague dream that I wanted to “make her play and narrate.”

There’s been a lot of copy-paste and trial-and-error, and more than one moment of just asking the AI to fix its own mistakes without even looking at the traceback myself; so I can tick them off the list. But the deeper I get into the project and my workflow evolves as I learn and develop, the more I realise I’m still holding on to discipline.

• I still read the diffs.
• I still think hard about architecture.
• I still stop and refactor when things feel messy.
• I still care about maintainability.

And the truth is

• While I can write Python functions now, AI is still faster.

It’s a weird middle ground to find myself in. I feel like I’m vibing, but in reality I’m half-engineering, half-vibe-coding. In reality though I’m neither because I still lack the ability to sit down and start from scratch with a blinking IDE. It’s not that I have the AI to speed up my process, or to do a fun throwaway weekend project. I have it because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to create anything. I drive to understand each piece of it fully not for a satisfactory reason but because if I didn’t, I would never know what was wrong.

The Vibe-Engineering Spectrum

The thing Karpathy’s definition nails is that vibe coding is not just “using AI to write code.”

Vibe coding is surrender. The antithesis of responsible engineering principles. But responsible engineering principles really matter most in a professional software production environment, not when you’re putting together something over a weekend where you sit back with your feet up on the desk just riffing through speech to text into the coding IDE of choice.

I think what I’m actually doing is closer to what Simon Willison’s blog¹ called “AI-assisted coding responsibly”:

• Use the AI to speed up scaffolding and boilerplate.
• Let it suggest solutions.
• But review everything, make conscious tradeoffs, and keep the big picture in mind.

It’s not vibe coding.
It’s … assisted craftsmanship.
And that’s fine.

So What Do I Call This?

I’m not sure yet. But I do know that what I’ve been doing doesn’t quite deserve the full vibes badge. Maybe that’s just my nature and I’ll never fully let go of the need to understand what’s going on under the hood.

But I don’t think I’d want to, either. Because when things break, which they do, it’s knowing how it all fits together that keeps me from throwing it all out and starting over.

Finding the Balance

Vibe coding is awesome. It’s fun. It’s fast. It’s a weekend hacker’s dream.

What I really enjoy isn’t vibe coding itself. It’s the ability to reclaim my creativity that had been lost for too long, it’s reignited a sense of wonder I thought had been quelled. There are vibes to my work but guided by real engineering principles, driven by a desire to show that the capability is in the hands of so many more people now. Touching back on the blog post mentioned earlier:

“If vibe coding grants millions of new people the ability to build their own custom tools, I could not be happier about it.

Some of those people will get bitten by the programming bug and go on to become proficient software developers. One of the biggest barriers to that profession is the incredibly steep initial learning curve—vibe coding shaves that initial barrier down to almost flat.”

This feels most where I am at. It does more than help me write the code, it helps me learn the code and that’s what matters most to me.

So here’s where I’ll leave it for now:

They may not be the originally intended vibes. But they’re mine.

- piestyx