Vibe engineering

I’m very much with Simon Willison about my dislike of the use of the term “vibe coding,” especially in the broad sense it’s come to be used.

When he initially coined the term, Andre Karpathy meant something quite specific–code generation where the person generating the code didn’t know or care about the code itself, just about the output. But it has quickly come to be used for essentially all code generation with large language models.

But I genuinely believe there is something quite different about a software engineer using these tools under some sort of supervision, perhaps with test harnesses and other processes to ensure the quality of the output, compared with folks who had written little if any software before using them to generate applications whole cloth.

Simon Willison here has coined the term “vibe engineering” to apply to the more judicious and careful use of these tools than simply YOLOing the generation of code.

To be quite honest, I am not entirely comfortable with the term “vibe coding” because I think the problem with the term is the word “vibe”.

And if you are optimistic about the capability of code generation tools and their continued improvement, then Vibe Engineering will, in short order, simply be engineering.

I’m certain when power tools were first introduced, there was quite some scepticism about their use by carpenters. These days, we don’t distinguish between a carpenter who uses hand tools and a carpenter who uses power tools. It’s all carpentry.