Intro
Right now the most trending topic is ‘Vibe coding’ for all software engineers. Youtubers and software engineers sharing the vibe coding experience on social media. Along with curiosity it’s a long debatable topic on the table that how it’s going to reshape total coding experience.
Vibe coding is a really new term in the software industry. Few months back Andrej Karpathy wrote a tweet about vibe coding and it got viral.
Andrej is renowned for his role as a director of AI Tesla and founding team member of OpenAI. His main point of idea was to write code using prompt (talking to a large language model). You may use chatgpt, claude for your work. You asked a question to chatgpt/other llms(large language models) and it explained everything. The way you give a prompt, they will give you the result that way. But it’s a different case when it comes to vibe coding. Vibe coding opens new opportunities for non coders or have only some basic knowledge of coding. If you encounter this topic, let us explain it. In this article we will break down each part how you can use it to bring your ideas to the real world faster.
First we like to tell you what programming is and how it works. Without knowing this part clearly you can’t understand the vibe coding part.
Programming is giving a computer a very specific step by step set of instructions so that it knows exactly what you want to achieve. Computers can’t understand our language that we usually speak. Computers only understand 0 & 1. To communicate with it we discover various programming languages (python, c++, Java, Javascript) so that we can give exact instructions to the computer what we actually want.
We usually write these programming languages on some IDE(Integrated Development Environment). Now we have a lot of online and offline IDEs. Before artificial intelligence we code manually. Here manually means we don’t code using any large language models. Or you can say without any code suggestion or prompt engineering.
The evolving started by giving us code suggestions. Github copilot gave us the suggestion on VS code IDE. If you write a function it writes the rest of it. Github copilot can do that because it has all the access of github. Github is one of the most popular places where software engineers can store their projects and can work with teammates.
On the other hand when we use any llms like chatgpt/claude/gemini they also have all the knowledge on the internet. And that’s why they can provide such information with specific instruction. From this point of view some teams work on how you can prompt inside an IDE and they find great results.
IDE has different sections like files, console, extensions, debuggers and tests. So it’s quite tricky to implement which section you’re currently working on. First company that came up with a great solution was Cursor. Where we can prompt to their prompt section and it writes all the codes for you. Additionally it also maintains all the files.
Cursor is the fastest company in the United States that grew 1 to 100 Million dollar revenue in just 12 months. After the success of cursor, Windsurf, Replit came to the picture. All of these software helps programmers to build their apps just by prompting. Andrej Karpathy used Cursor to build some cool apps and show it to X(formerly twitter). But it brings with it enormous possibilities and questions about programming.
First question was do we need any programmers to write code for building our next software. Right now the question is absolutely ‘NO’. A big no simply because these AI powered coding softwares are not capable enough to handle all the problems that programmers do on a daily basis. Till date no ai powered software can build the whole large scale enterprise level software.
How much coding knowledge do I need to start vibe coding?
There is no specific curriculum for this. Programming is a vast field and each field needs different types of language, framework to work on. It’s better to have years of coding experience before starting vibe coding. Most fundamental problem that I mentioned earlier is that you can’t solve everything with just prompt right now. You need knowledge and patience for solving a bug. Also a lot of software engineers shared bad experiences with vibe coding. They shared that it takes a longer time to solve a problem than doing it manually. So if you want to build something by vibe coding it’s good to have experience in that field. But if you really want to start vibe coding then you can follow these steps.
Take an example of web development.
- First learn the basics HTML, CSS.
- You don’t need to spend a month just learning HTML and CSS.
- Build some basic websites using these two.
- Learn Javascript basics. And add javascript to those websites to make it functional.
- Now if you want to feel the vibe coding, start it with a small project.
- Do this experiment to build a full stack project.
In one sentence we can summarise this – learn basics, implement without prompt, try to fix bugs, when you have that knowledge start prompting.
Can I build real world projects through vibe coding?
Yes, you can build real world projects through vibe coding and earn money. This makes it real, a guy named Levelsio. He made a 2D plane shooting game with vibe coding and earned thousands of dollars from it. But obviously he has years of knowledge of frontend and backend.
Many young entrepreneurs started their first company with vibe coding. Vibe coding makes it faster for them to launch MVP(minimum viable product). Startup founders now can save tons of money. Now it’s really easy to launch your own product. And get quick validity from your customers. People are launching their product using vibe coding and you can do so.
Cost of vibe coding
None of these software is absolutely free. They basically use big companies like OpenAI’s chatgpt, Claude, Google’s gemini to get work done. The initial code completion is free but when you want to chat more with IDE’s they charge you money.
Popular IDE’s like Cursor give first 2000 completion for free and for unlimited completion it costs $20 per month.
If you already have coding knowledge and want to build your product then the paid version is worthy of buying.