He coined “vibe coding” earlier this year. Now, he has something to say about it.<\/p>\n
Andrej Karpathy led AI at Tesla<\/a> for five years, steering the company’s Autopilot effort<\/a> and briefly working on its humanoid robot Optimus<\/a>. He sandwiched his Tesla job with two stints at OpenAI, making Karpathy a cofounder of the AI pioneer.<\/p>\n As 2025 comes to a close, Karpathy published his year-in-review for large language models on X. He reflected on the famous term he originated in February, a term that has since shaken up<\/a> the software engineering industry.<\/p>\n “With vibe coding, programming is not strictly reserved for highly trained professionals,” Karpathy wrote. He called it an example of how “regular people benefit a lot more from LLMs compared to professionals, corporations and governments.”<\/p>\n Vibe coding has likely benefited businesses, too. Tech companies have equipped their engineers with tools like Cursor<\/a>, Claude Code<\/a>, and OpenAI’s Codex<\/a>, aiming for productivity gains.<\/p>\n Karpathy wrote that vibe coding “empowers trained professionals to write a lot more (vibe coded) software that would otherwise never be written.”<\/p>\n It may also change the makeup \u2014 or the use case \u2014\u00a0of the code itself. Karpathy threw out a slew of adjectives to describe this new body of code: It is “free, ephemeral, malleable, discardable after single use.”<\/p>\n “Vibe coding will terraform software and alter job descriptions,” he wrote.<\/p>\n How does Karpathy feel about being the term’s origin?<\/p>\n “Amusingly, I coined the term “vibe coding” in this shower of thoughts tweet<\/a> totally oblivious to how far it would go,” he wrote.<\/p>\n 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\u2026<\/p>\n \u2014 Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) February 2, 2025<\/a> <\/p>\n It’s not yet clear how efficient vibe coding is making engineers. In a METR study published in July<\/a>, AI coding assistants were found to decrease the productivity of participating experienced software developers by 19%. The developers in that study were also overconfident in the tools, its authors said, expecting a 20% productivity boost even after using them.<\/p>\n What is clear, though, is that the practice is unlocking a whole new form of tech products. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey vibe-coded a new messaging app<\/a> this year. Non-technical workers<\/a> are easily building, shipping, and, in some cases, even selling apps they build in hours, if not minutes.<\/p>\n Karpathy gave some other reflections. He praised Google Gemini’s Nano Banana<\/a> image model, and wrote that Claude Code<\/a> was the “first convincing demonstration of what an LLM Agent looks like.”<\/p>\n Overall, Karpathy wrote that 2025 was an “exciting and mildly surprising year of LLMs.”<\/p>\n