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A brief history of and a guide to vibe coding by Dominik Lukeš. Written 23 March 2025.
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For two years now, Andrej Karpathy's profile on X.com has said "The hottest new programming language is English". When he wrote that on January 24, 2023, just less than two months after ChatGPT was released, it seemed like a very aspirational statement. But Karpathy is not new to the scene—back in 2017, just months after the original Transformer paper was published (though no one yet knew it would lead to the large language model revolution), he wrote a seminal blog post called "Software 2.0" that predicted a fundamental shift in how we develop software.
In that post, Karpathy talked about a move from "Software 1.0" (explicit code written by programmers in languages like Python or C++) to "Software 2.0" (programs defined by neural network weights discovered through optimization). He wrote: "It turns out that a large portion of real-world problems have the property that it is significantly easier to collect the data (or more generally, identify a desirable behavior) than to explicitly write the program."
But even he did not imagine what his vision would become once we had general language models that we can simply talk to as opposed to collecting datasets and training neural networks for specific tasks.
It wasn't until August 2021 that we saw the first demo from OpenAI of Codex, their AI system that translates natural language to code. In their original announcement, they showcased impressive demos of creating games, webpages, and more using simple English instructions. You can watch these demos in their live demonstration video. Codex later became the foundation for GitHub Copilot, which took about a year to come together as a product people could buy.
At first, tools like Copilot just created code snippets similar to what ChatGPT can do in a chat. This was useful but a long way from writing complete software. It wasn't until 2023 that Copilot added a chat feature where people could just tell it what they wanted, that lived up to the promise of the original Codex demo. But in the last year, things got even further along and tools like Cursor and Windsurf started adding agentic features, meaning you don't just ask them to write snippets—it can actually traverse your whole codebase and make decisions about it.
As we can see in the Andreessen Horowitz report "From Prompt to Product: The Rise of AI-Powered Web App Builders," these new coding tools are not just popular, they are some of the most popular and useful generative AI applications available. In particular, Cursor and Windsurf - with Cursor being #41 of the top 100 most popular AI apps.
Back in 2017, or even when he updated his Twitter profile in 2023, Karpathy didn't know how good these tools would get, even though he was obviously well ahead of the game in terms of vision for what was possible. That vision, as we can see, definitely proved right. And then he changed the world again with a simple tweet that's only two months old but has already transformed how many people think about coding:
"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."
In less than two months, "vibe coding" has become the term on everybody's lips. It's a concept that makes it possible for developers to be more productive and for non-developers to venture into areas they wouldn't have been comfortable before.
But it's not all just one thing, there are gradations to how we can now "program in English":
The most basic level is asking ChatGPT to generate code snippets you can copy and paste elsewhere. This is what showed Karpathy the possible future that led to his "hottest new programming language is English" tweet in early 2023. This is obviously not the best way to do this anymore and not really a way for non-coders to make software easily because the knowledge required about what to do with the code snippets is too high.
Last year, Anthropic's Claude gained a new feature called Artifacts that would take the code snippets and actually let you run them inside a side bar. This was great (and copied widely), but these widgets could only do things in side the browser and were difficult to share in one place. This inspired my latest vibe coding project to create my Artifacts Gallery to preserve and organize Claude Artifacts (more about which below).