Software developers are quickly learning the good, the bad, and the ugly of outsourcing app development to AI – and CIOs have much to learn from their vibe coding experiences.
Digital preservation can be a long and complicated business. The act of converting a dusty, old tome into a digital file necessitates the archivist transposing the inken script into pixels using an optical character recognition (OCR) program. If the scans fed into the software are of a sufficiently high quality, that should be the end of it. But a blurred or tilted image of the document can result in a disjointed, garbled output, necessitating hours of more work correcting each sentence one by one.
That’s where vibe coding can come to the rescue. The act of addressing an AI model using natural language to create an app or an aspect of software out of whole cloth, enterprising archivists could vibe code an app where unreliable OCR text can be dumped, sorted and rationalised automatically – all without knowing a lick of Python, Java or COBOL.
At least, that’s the idea. So named by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, vibe coding is also a philosophy, smashing apart the idea that app creators, by definition, actually know how to write code. Using the next evolution of AI-assisted coding tools, such as Cursor, Windsurf, Replit, along with AI chatbots like Claude, requires novices to simply describe the type of app, website or application they want, and pfft, the LLM will create it. This is why “the hottest new programming language,” Karpathy said in a tweet viewed 7.4m times, “is English.”
In this way, vibe coding is very different to other AI coding tools such as GitHub Copilot, which intuitively suggests code completion, and from low-code or no-code, which use visual interfaces to support users in dragging and dropping different applications and functionality built by professionals and designed to work together. As Neal Riley, co-founder and general manager at Salable explains, with vibe coding, the LLM is squarely responsible for answering the question of “how” to solve a specific task in the development process, as opposed to taking an action that the coder has thought through first.
“Vibe coding is an ‘agentic’ style of coding,” says Riley. “It moves away from a ‘chat-like’ experience, where a user guides a single action, the LLM executes, and returns to the user asking for the next step. Agentic systems can break down a query from a user into a set of actions, taking each in turn without user intervention.”
While vibe coding is said to ‘democratise’ coding, collapsing the barriers for non-professionals, it’s also genuinely game-changing for software developers, argues Katie Paxton-Fear, a principal security research engineer at Harness.
“Vibe coding redefines the software development process due to the speed [at] which software can be developed,” says Paxton-Fear, essentially offloading the boring, repetitive parts of coding to the LLM. “On the enterprise level, that’s where AI-generated code will take over.”
Heidi Vella 