Time flies, but time flies especially fast in the AI world.
Exactly one year ago today, on February 3, 2025, Andrej Karpathy posted something on X that would define a generation of software development. The former Tesla AI director and OpenAI founding member wrote:
“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 so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like ‘decrease the padding on the sidebar by half’ because I’m too lazy to find it. I ‘Accept All’ always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I’d have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding – I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.”
What seemed like a playful observation about weekend projects has become the dominant paradigm of software development in 2026. Vibe coding isn’t just mainstream—it’s how software gets built now, even at the companies pushing AI forward.
The transformation began with Cursor, the AI-native IDE that Karpathy referenced in his original post. Cursor was the first to make AI pair programming feel natural, integrating Claude Sonnet directly into the development workflow. But it was just the beginning. Windsurf followed as another coding IDE.
Then came the inflection point: Claude Code, Anthropic’s command-line tool that took vibe coding from novelty to necessity. The numbers tell the story. According to Anthropic’s Boris Cherny, 80% of Claude Code’s code was written by Claude Code itself. Months later, he went even further, revealing that Claude Code wrote “pretty much all the code” for Cowork, Anthropic’s desktop automation tool. In a follow-up interview, he also shared that he didn’t open an IDE all of last month, relying entirely on Claude Code for his coding work. OpenAI too recently entered the arena with Codex, their answer to Claude Code, ensuring that vibe coding would remain the standard regardless of which AI lab you prefer.
The cultural impact has been profound. Naval Ravikant captured the shift perfectly: “Vibe coding is the new product management. Training and tuning models is the new coding,” he says. Even NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang embraced it, stating that “nothing would give me more joy than if my software engineers never had to write code.”
The metrics validate the revolution. The number of iOS apps released is up 60% over last year, a surge directly attributed to vibe coding’s accessibility. Even Linux creator Linus Torvalds is vibe coding, using Google’s Antigravity. And the startup ecosystem has responded accordingly—Lovable, a vibe coding platform, became a unicorn just eight months after being founded.
A year ago, Karpathy was describing something amusing that happened on weekend projects. Today, it’s not just how we build software—it’s how we think about building software. The vibes, it turns out, were right all along.