Vibe coding

Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI write the code, rather than typing every line yourself. You stay in the loop steering, correcting and accepting, but the model does the keystrokes. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy to capture a looser, conversational style where you lean on the model and barely read the diff.

For a lean founder this is the difference between shipping a wedge yourself this week and waiting on a contractor for a month. It collapses the cost of building internal tools, prototypes and even production features to roughly the cost of thinking clearly about what you need.

Say you want an internal dashboard for your sales pipeline. You describe the tables and views to Claude, point it at a Supabase database for storage and auth, and you have a working app in an afternoon without writing a line of SQL yourself. Or say you're scoping a customer-portal feature: you sketch the spec as a ticket in Linear first, then have the model build against it, so there's a written brief to check the result against rather than a vibe.

The catch: a vibe-coded app you do not understand becomes a liability the moment it breaks. Treat the AI as a fast junior who needs a spec, a review and tests, not as a black box you trust blindly.