Vibe Coding

Andrej Karpathy typed two words in February 2025 and split the developer world in half.

"Vibe coding" — describing what you want, accepting the AI-generated code that comes back, iterating by feel instead of by understanding. Within weeks, every developer had an opinion. Half called it the future. Half called it professional malpractice. Almost nobody was being honest about what it actually is.

Vibe Coding: The End of Traditional Programming? cuts through both the hype and the backlash with something rarer than either — firsthand experience building real software this way, every day.

What you'll discover:

• The precise definition of vibe coding — stripped of memes, marketing, and panic
• How Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and Replit Agent actually work under the hood — not what their landing pages claim
• The "90/10" pattern — where AI-generated code handles 90% of the work brilliantly, and where the last 10% will destroy you
• Prompting for code versus prompting for text — a fundamentally different skill most developers haven't developed yet
• Prototypes, internal tools, and CRUD apps — the sweet spot where vibe coding already outperforms traditional development
• Complex logic, security, and performance — the failure modes nobody demos at conferences
• The "nobody knows why it works" problem — and why it matters more than you think
• Who can build software now that never could before — and the real risks that creates
• Why senior developers are skeptical, where they're right, and where they're fighting the last war
• Where this lands in two to five years — and what that means for your career starting now

This book is for you if:

• You're a developer trying to figure out whether AI coding tools are a threat, a superpower, or both
• You're a non-technical founder exploring whether vibe coding replaces a technical co-founder
• You're an engineering manager who needs the honest version — not the vendor pitch
• You want someone who actually builds this way to tell you what works and what doesn't

The question mark in the title is intentional. Shane Larson built The Vibe Coded SaaS — a production product developed almost entirely through AI-assisted coding — and uses these tools daily. The answer he found is more interesting than a simple yes or no.