Published Mar 19, 2025 – 11 min read – Text Only

There’s a trend on social media where many repeat Andrej Karpathy’s words (archived): “give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” This belief — like many flawed takes humanity holds — comes from laziness, inexperience, and self-deluding imagination. It is called “Vibe Coding.”

Producing software is now more accessible as newer tools allow people to describe what they want in a natural language to a large language model (LLM). This idea is catching on because LLM agents are now accessible to anyone willing to subscribe to vendors like Cursor, GitHub, Windsurf, and others. These editors have an “agent” option where users can request something and in response changes are made to the appropriate files, rather than only the file currently in focus. Over time, the agent will request to run commands to run tests or even run scripts it previously wrote to the file system, much as you would if you were solving the problem.

In 2022, folks could copy code into ChatGPT and ask questions or for rewrites.

In 2023, folks could ask it to review and edit a single file with an IDE integration like Copilot.

In 2024 and 2025, folks could ask it to solve a specific problem in the project and have it find out what files to edit, edit them, then verify its own work, and correct any mistakes it made with feedback from linting errors and unit tests.

With LLM agents having so much capability, people can delegate the idea of refining their imprecise ideas to a precise implementation elaborated by an LLM through “Vibe Coding.”

If you open a blank folder and tell it to set up an initial project, it can do a lot at once. With no rules, no patterns to mimic, and no constraints, it can produce something that feels more tailored for you in minutes than npx create-react-app ever could.

With a simple instruction like “I want to create a website for my ski resort” and about ten minutes of having it massage errors of its own making, I can have just that.

These leaps of progress are what fuels the “Vibe Coding” idea. To go from nothing to something shareable and personal sounds incredible.

Agents, as a concept, aren’t new. Google IO made up buzzwords like “agentic era” (archived) to describe this concept. It has been realized through open technologies like AutoGPT, XAgent, and more recently by Anthropic with the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

When the model can interact with more than just a person who proxies their outputs into different domains, it is autonomous. If it can perform searches on the web or in a codebase, it can enrich its own context with the information it needs to fulfill the current request. Further, when it can commit outputs and then gain immediate and automatic feedback on those outputs, it can refine its solution without a person intervening.

There are actions that do prompt the user for consent before proceeding, such as running commands in the console or deleting files. This consent can be pre approved with a mode called “YOLO.”

You can witness this autonomy for yourself today in Cursor.

The agent concept has merit and today can deliver proofs of concept that VC firms like Y-Combinator will invest in — proofs of concept that are trash by unskilled founders hoping to win the lottery while living the life of leisure.

The execution of agents today is over-hyped and does not hold up to the needs of any functioning businesses which need experts to develop and maintain their technical capabilities instead of single points of failure on the internet.

These models are trained on average sloppy code, wrong answers on Stack Overflow, and the junk that ends up on Quora. Despite the power and capability Claud