Vibe-Coding

I have become the living embodiment of my own contradiction. Almost a week ago, I published “The Vibe Coding Paradox: When Understanding Became Optional”, exploring the unsettling implications of Andrej Karpathy’s confession that he was building functional applications without comprehending the code they contained. I wrote about the psychological weight of surrendering comprehension and the fundamental questions vibe coding raises about human expertise in an AI-driven world. Then I immediately embarked on my own vibe coding projects, like the one I’m about to tell you about. ...

The crisis of understanding arrived without fanfare, but its confession was public. On February 6, 2025, Jean Hsu sat down to build a “Trader Joe’s Snack Box Builder” and made a startling admission: “I didn’t even read the code that was generated.” Within two hours, she had deployed a functional application. “I didn’t edit a single line of code by hand, unless you count my OpenAI API key I copy/pasted.” That same day, Andrej Karpathy—co-founder of OpenAI, former AI director at Tesla, a programmer whose expertise was beyond question—made his own confession that would redefine what it means to create software. His tweet about “vibe coding” described something unprecedented in the history of human craft: the ability to build functional, complex systems without comprehending how they work. ...