In Appreciation of Vibe Coding

Vibe coding is a conversational, AI-first programming paradigm popularized by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, where developers provide natural language prompts to LLMs to generate working code, and the user guides and refines it—often without direct, line-by-line programming. It’s great for rapid prototyping and non-experts, but carries risks in terms of code quality, comprehension, and security when used in serious development contexts.

I guess it’s only fitting to start this post by using a definition of Vibe Coding summarised by ChatGPT-5. I know for sure that I’ve spent quite a lot of time guiding and refining a black box toward a goal I had pictured in my mind.

This very new theme for the blog has been expeditely provided by Cortex, which has become my favourite tool of all. As I’m typing this, Cortex is busy behind the scenes fixing bugs and writing new features across 3 projects: 1 on the web and two for iOS.

And this is where the very last line of the definition above comes into play: carries risks in terms of code quality, comprehension, and security

On my web project, I do know what I’m talking about, I can review the code, understand way better how to steer the AI in the correct direction for the result I need, and I can fix issues faster as I can understand where things are going wrong.

On the iOS side of things, I’ll be honest, I’m in the complete darkness. I’m following a similar process, still describing in plain english what I want the app to do and look like, but I have no recourse when I invevitably have to spend an hour fixing Xcode errors or if the result has been interpreted slightly differently from what I wanted originally. There are way more trials and errors, and still, I’ve managed to get satisfying (for me) results.

The debate online remains mixed. My own feelings about it remain mixed. But there is no doubt this technology is unlocking more and more creative avenues for me. Yes it can be frustrating, but it’s also immensly fun and satisfying once you get to the destination you had set off to find!

I’ll keep exploring and I’ll keep fixing bugs, as long as I’ll keep having fun with the results! If you haven’t tried yet, but you have an idea you’d like to try, I’d urge you to give it a go – the entry point is very affordable and I’m sure you’ll find great satisfaction in having the result of your work becoming something tangible for the world to see!