Vibecoding: Software for One
By Kevin Roose
I’m not a coder. I can’t write a single line of Python, JavaScript, or C++. Except for a brief period in my teenage years when I built websites, I’ve never been a software engineer, nor do I aspire to leave journalism for the tech industry.
And yet, for the past several months, I’ve been coding quite a bit.
Among my creations: a tool that transcribes and summarizes long podcasts, a tool to organize my social media bookmarks into a searchable database, a website that tells me whether a piece of furniture will fit in my car’s trunk, and an app called LunchBox Buddy, which analyzes the contents of my fridge and helps me decide what to pack for my son’s school lunch.
These projects are all thanks to artificial intelligence, and a new AI trend known as “vibecoding.”
Vibecoding, a term popularized by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, is shorthand for the way today’s AI tools enable even non-technical hobbyists to build fully functioning apps and websites by simply typing prompts into a text box. You don’t have to know how to code to vibecode. Having an idea, and a bit of patience, is usually enough.
“It’s not really coding,” Karpathy wrote. “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.”
My experiments have been aimed at making what I call “software for one” – small, bespoke apps that solve specific problems in my life. These aren’t the types of tools a big tech company would build; there’s no real market, their features are limited, and some of them only sort of work.
Kevin Roose
