On weekday evenings, heading home on the subway from Union Square in New York City, I log into an A.I. tool from my phone and write a prompt. “Look at the data in the files I just uploaded,” I tap. “Load it into a database, then make it searchable with a web interface.” Underground in the subway tunnels my internet connection drops, but when my train emerges onto the Manhattan Bridge, I get a few minutes to see all the work my coding agent has done, and if I type fast enough I can issue another prompt. By the time I get home to Brooklyn, my little project tends to be done: a website, a feature in a music app, a complex search tool or some tiny game.
This is called “vibe coding,” a term coined a year ago by the artificial intelligence expert Andrej Karpathy. To vibe code is to make software with prompts sent to a specialized chatbot — not coding, but telling — and letting the bot work out the bugs. Like many other programmers, I use a product called Claude Code from Anthropic, although Codex from OpenAI does about as well, and Google Gemini is not far behind. Claude Code earned $1 billion for Anthropic in its first six months. It was always a helpful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got much better, and ever since I’ve been knocking off side projects that had sat in folders for a decade or longer. It’s fun to see old ideas come to life, so I keep a steady flow. Maybe it adds up to a half-hour a day of my time, and an hour of Claude’s.
