The aspiring app developers of today no longer have to be fluent in coding. Instead, many are describing apps into existence using plain English. In a world increasingly fueled by the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence, user-friendly large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are now able to transform plain-language requests into working computer code, enabling novice programmers to cobble together programs that would otherwise be above their pay grade. It’s a phenomenon that’s been dubbed “vibe coding,” which OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, who is widely credited with coining the term earlier this year, described as the type of coding “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” “I ask for the dumbest things like ‘decrease the padding on the sidebar by half’ because I’m too lazy to find it,” Karpathy wrote in a February X post. “When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it.” AI-powered coding platforms like Cursor and Replit, which advertise themselves as allowing users to code using only text prompts, have made it even easier for people to deploy web and mobile apps without ever formulating their own lines of code. “We’re at the stage where [AI tools] have become very democratized, and you don’t need any technical background,” said Nadia Ben Brahim Maazaoui, who left her career in hospitality management several years ago to stay at home with her young daughter. When Ben Brahim Maazaoui, 36, began delving into generative AI in recent years, she found AI models useful for things like making vision boards and guiding meditations. But for her daughter’s fourth birthday, she decided to get a bit more ambitious: She used ChatGPT to build what she calls a personalized “robot friend” for the child.
