A Deep Dive
The Era of Vibe Coding
A Timeline — 2022 to 2026
"Vibe Coding"
A programming paradigm where the developer focuses on high-level intent — the "vibe" — and delegates the actual code writing to AI, often accepting changes without reading diffs. Coined by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025.
The Genesis of Generative Code
The era of "The Magic Trick." AI moves from research to a novelty consumer tool.
OpenAI releases ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), bringing conversational coding assistance to the mainstream. It introduces the concept of shifting from "deductive programming" (writing rules) toward conversational intent.
GitHub Copilot popularizes "autocomplete on steroids," predicting the next few lines of code based on immediate context. The era of Tab-Tab-Tab begins.
Developers paste snippets into a chat window, ask for a fix, and manually copy-paste the result back. It is cumbersome but magical.
The Assistant Era
The era of "The Co-pilot." AI sits beside the developer, offering suggestions that require heavy human review.
GPT-4 brings high-fidelity reasoning, enabling AI to solve more complex logic puzzles and refactor small functions reliably. A quantum leap in code quality.
Anthropic introduces a 100,000-token context window, allowing developers to paste entire small libraries or documentation into the chat for the first time.
AI is treated as a "junior pair programmer." Trust is low; line-by-line review is mandatory. Every output is scrutinized before being accepted.
The Race for Context & Agency
The era of "The Shift." Massive context windows and early agents begin to automate multi-step tasks.
Google introduces a 1-million-token context window, theoretically allowing AI to "hold" entire codebases in memory. Reduces the need for RAG systems but introduces "lost in the middle" accuracy issues.
Anthropic releases "Artifacts," a dedicated window for AI-generated code and UI, moving away from simple chat streams. This foreshadows the "agentic" interface.
Developers begin shifting from writing syntax to "orchestrating" outputs, though manual intervention is still frequent. The role of the developer starts to evolve.
The Year of Vibe Coding
The era of "Material Disengagement." Developers stop writing code and start managing intent.
Andrej Karpathy coins the term "Vibe Coding," describing a workflow where he "barely touches the keyboard," "accepts all," and relies on copy-pasting error messages to fix bugs.
Cursor releases the Composer model. It enables multi-agent parallel execution — developers can spin up 8 agents to try different solutions simultaneously. Task completion drops from hours to under 30 seconds.
Google launches Antigravity, an "agent-first" IDE where the primary interface is a "Mission Control" dashboard rather than a text editor.
Claude Opus 4.5 positions itself as the best coding model, slashing prices by 67%. GPT-5.2 releases as OpenAI's "Code Red" response. The model wars accelerate.
— Andrej Karpathy, February 2025
Vibe Engineering & The "Post-Junior" Crisis
The era of "Orchestration & Technical Debt." The novelty fades, replaced by the complexity of managing autonomous agents.
Users of Google Antigravity report performance degradation ("lobotomy effect") due to compute throttling, highlighting the fragility of relying entirely on cloud-based agents for coding.
The casual "Vibe Coding" evolves into Vibe Engineering (Process-as-Code). Developers no longer review lines of code; they review the orchestration of agents — Architect, Coder, Reviewer — to ensure security and compliance.
Industry analysts identify a "dark flow" state where developers feel productive ("junk flow") because they're generating massive amounts of code, but actual productivity drops due to time spent fixing subtle, AI-generated bugs.
The world's largest AI training cluster (2 Gigawatts, 555k GPUs) comes online to train Grok 5. The unit of work shifts from the "line of code" to the "complete task."