Kevin Roose

Well, I am not ageist.

I think people have lots of different levels of comfort with technology.

I think my tone of voice was directed at you specifically, Natalie, because I know that you are younger than me.

And so you have no excuse to be this confused by technology.

So vibe coding is a term that was coined about a year ago by a guy named Andre Karpathy, who's a former programmer at OpenAI, very well known out here in Silicon Valley.

And he was describing this thing

thing that he was doing using these new AI coding tools which is that instead of learning a programming language and writing the code line by line by himself he would just sort of let the program write the code for him and build software that way let the vibes do the work

Let the vibes do the work.

Exactly.

And suddenly for the first time about a year ago, you didn't have to know how to code to build software.

You could just use these tools.

They would help you along the way and you could just kind of oversee them as they worked.

Yeah, so I tried vibe coding about a year ago when this term first emerged, and I would build these little test tools for myself.

I built an app called Lunchbox Buddy, which was basically a way to help me pack my son's lunch by just taking a photo of whatever was in my fridge and giving it to this tool and saying, like,

What are the different combinations of things I could put in this four-compartment lunchbox?

Yeah.

I built some other stuff, too.

But honestly, it was kind of clunky.

The tools, basically, you still needed to know a little bit about programming to be able to do this.

And they were pretty buggy.