Parmy Olson, Columnist

The Vibe Coding Revolution Is Getting Overhyped

Yes, AI is having a huge impact on programming. No, businesses shouldn’t ditch their engineers.

March 25, 2025 at 5:00 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce Inc.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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The word “vibe” has become so ubiquitous that it’s started to lose its meaning. A buzzy new phrase, vibe coding, has gripped the tech industry just a month after it was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and venerated programmer who posted on X that it was “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." In other words, let AI do all the coding for you.

Since then, the phrase has popped up everywhere in tech circles — on social media, forums like Hacker News, executive posts on LinkedIn and in Slack channels populated by startup founders in the Y Combinator accelerator in California. “The term is blowing up,” says Chaz Englander, founder of Model ML, which went through the program last year.