<rant> I really dislike that term.
It’s antithetical to everything programming means to me. I don’t even like the word "coding"... Programming is an art of intellectual precision, and I prefer the language used to talk about it to reflect that.
How do you know you’re a top “vibe coder”? You really dislike what I wrote here. You can feel it in your gut. The "vibe" just isn’t right. </rant>
> I really dislike that term. It’s antithetical to everything programming means to me
That's why I like the term! It nicely describes and activity that is antithetical to those things - craftsmanship, mastery, paying close attention to what you're doing, having a clear outcome in mind.
My hot take is that I personally feel 'flow' is already dangerously close to vibe coding, so I'm not surprised that vibe coding is seemingly taking off like it is. If you need to be buried in your subconscious to achieve any meaningful work then it's likely you've failed somewhere in your design or your baseline productivity/discipline.
Not to say that it has as many negative side effects as vibe coding or that context switching is 0 cost, but it's interesting how similar they feel in my mind even discarding the 'embrace the exponentials' rhetoric.
100% agreed. Karpathy seems to have coined it - it's up there with "asshat" and "awesome sauce" for profoundly stupid terms.
I personally use agentic programming to refer to a workflow that consists of having an agent (Cline, Claude Coder, etc.) write the majority of the code for you, but unlike "vibe coding" you're still taking a minimal amount of time to sanity check the output.
People constantly defend it by saying that "vibe coding" isn't meant for production (yada yada), but let's not be naive, because it will 100% be used to push actual applications.
"Vibe coding" reminds me of the "10x Developer" memes I used to see.
"10x Developer doesn't have time to explain things." "10x Developer doesn't have time for pleasantries."
I thought it was a joke, but people were serious ... 10x Developer label sounded just an excuse for being an asshole... or how processes shouldn't apply to them (a disaster waiting to happen).
Vibe coding just seems to be an excuse for not being careful / thoughtful.
I don't care to police how someone codes on their own time so have fun I say, but if you have to sell me on the fact that you're "vibe coding" it sounds like an excuse ...