Double click: When coding becomes conversation
Developers are embracing a new way of building software that’s more conversation than code. But is it more mayhem than magic?
Welcome to Double Click, where we ask our community to weigh in on trending topics in tech and design.
When tech’s resident AI explainer, former OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy, posted about something he called “vibe coding” earlier this month, it hit a nerve with tech Twitter. “There’s a new kind of coding where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists,” he wrote, describing how he now builds projects by simply talking to AI. “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.”
The tweet sparked a flurry of responses and memes—some enthusiastic, others scandalized. It’s the kind of debate spurred by every major shift in coding, wrote Nick Baumann, Product Marketing Manager at Cline: from assembly to C, from C to Python, and now potentially from traditional coding to AI-assisted development. But what exactly is vibe coding, and why is it suddenly everywhere?
From punch cards to pure vibes
Forget writing code line by line. Vibe coding is more like having a chat. You describe what you want, AI makes it happen, and you keep the dialogue flowing until it feels right. Less syntax, more vibes.
“I started off vibe coding on Neopets as a kid, and that playful experimentation is exactly what AI has reignited for me now,” says Charmaine Lee, Product Manager at Val Town. “To me, that’s the essence of it: letting code feel as casual as scribbling in a doc or spinning up a Google Sheet.”
In computing’s early days, programming meant meticulously preparing physical punch cards—each representing a single instruction—and waiting hours or days to see if they worked. Even as we progressed to typing code directly into computers, developers still faced a significant gap between conceiving an idea and seeing it come to life. “While we’ve progressed far beyond punch cards to live coding, expressing interactive ideas through code remains a bottleneck,” says Designer Nikolas Klein, who works on prototyping at Figma. “For me, vibe coding isn’t about coding at all. It’s about a faster and more accessible way to express and iterate on your interactive ideas.”
This isn’t just theoretical—it’s already changing who can build software. “Vibe coding is already here. 75% of Replit customers never write a single line of code!!” tweeted Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit.
Vincent credits vibe coding for helping him make this running coach when he had no clue how to write SwiftUI and, more recently, the loading animation for “a TikTok-like Wikipedia app that learns from you.”
“I love vibe coding,” says Vincent van der Meulen, Software Engineer at Figma. “I’ve made many side projects without looking at the code much, and even see coworkers already employing it for prototypes.”
Reality hits different
But expectation doesn’t always equal reality. “Right now vibe coding is especially fun at the start of a project. But you inevitably hit a valley of despair when the project gets too complex for the LLM to do a good job,” says Vincent. Figma Software Engineer Anro Robinson has been on the same emotional rollercoaster. “I’ve definitely gotten 80% of the way to what I wanted, which is truly magical, but I always end up with a pile of spaghetti code that doesn’t really have a coherent internal data model,” he says. “From there I’m stuck: I can’t prompt it to get the details right or edit it to meet my needs.”
Julius Tarng, Research Engineer Resident at Anthropic, likens it to “a fever dream you sometimes get into when you’re coding late at night, in delirium...you have 10 blocks of commented out code from previous attempts, and eventually you get to something that works, but your code is in such a f---ed up state that there’s no way it’ll pass code review.”
The challenge goes deeper than messy code. “Relying too much on AI-generated code without reviewing it can lead to issues with maintainability, accessibility, and long-term quality,” warns Carmen Ansio, Design Engineer at LottieFiles. “When we stop reading the code and debugging turns into trial and error, we risk building interfaces that ‘work’ but lack structure, efficiency, and inclusivity.”
Designer Ryan Mather puts it more bluntly: “The word vibe is not right. Vibe coding implies you’re steering it and evaluating it based on vibes, but in practice it’s more like QA whack-a-mole.”
Calling it a “vibe” is misleading, agrees Figma Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh: “Have I vibe-wanted to yeet my computer into the sun trying to vibe code? Yes. If you know what you want to build and you care about exactly how to get there, it’s not a vibe. It’s a nightmare.”
If you know what you want to build and you care about exactly how you get there, it’s not a vibe. It’s a nightmare.
Finding its place in the toolkit
This doesn’t mean that we should write the vibes off completely, though. In the right hands, it’s not all bad. In fact, “I do think this is an emerging behavior that helps people with prior programming experience more than it helps someone totally new to programming,” says Barron Webster, Founding Designer at Sandbar, “kind of like a pastry chef would know what causes croissants not to rise, but someone who just orders them at a cafe wouldn’t.”
“It’s changed how I see ‘low lift,’” says Charmaine. “If a quick snippet unblocks the team, why not do it? Instead of delegating every tweak or addition, I’ll just jump in, like editing a Google Doc rather than emailing its owner.”
Vincent sees the lines blurring with engineers starting to think like designers, designers starting to think like engineers, and everyone becoming what he calls “orchestrators.” He says, “Vibe coding is one of the first examples of how the roles of design, engineering, and PMs will all converge.”
When vibes meet the real world
While AI holds promise as a creative partner, it also demands deep engineering expertise to deliver real value. “AI can be a great creative partner, but thoughtful engineering is still essential,” says Carmen. “We need to strike a balance between speed and quality to build scalable, accessible experiences.”
We need to strike a balance between speed and quality to build scalable, accessible experiences.
“It doesn’t mean sidelining the craft of software,” Charmaine emphasizes. “On the contrary, it’s more vital than ever. By removing friction, we open up new ways to build and ship.”
“We’ll have to think of new ways to quickly judge whether a generation is up to spec,” says Vincent. Maybe we’ll be reviewing diagrams instead of code reviews. As one designer quipped on Slack, “Can’t wait for a TikTok where someone just talks to code layers repeatedly saying ‘make it pop more.’”
The TLDR
Perhaps the question isn’t whether vibe coding will replace traditional development—it won’t—but rather how it might expand who can build software and how we build it.
