Vibe coding

Telling an agent to build software without looking at the implementation. Coined by andrej-karpathy. Distinct from programming (which implies understanding loops, conditions, primitives). dhh's experiment: wrote his own writing app in C++/Qt without reading a line, treating it as a black box.

Caveat from Basecamp 5 (Feb 2026): unreviewed vibe-coded PRs individually fine, collectively "destroyed the architecture" — architecture stewardship still needs a human (for now, because tokens are scarce).

Karpathy's own demo (How I use LLMs, 74:02): a tic-tac-toe React app built with Cursor Composer on Claude 3.7 Sonnet, then "add confetti when someone wins." The agent installed react-confetti, added winning-cell styling, and fetched a victory sound from a URL he couldn't trace. He accepted it without fully reading: "honestly I'm not keeping full track of this." His definition: giving control to the agent "and hoping that it works", with ordinary programming as the fallback.

Source: report · report