Vibe Coding Considered Harmful: When AI-Assisted Speed Kills Software Quality
Andrej Karpathy coined "vibe coding" in early 2025 to describe a style of programming where you "fully give into the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." You describe what you want in natural language, the AI generates it, and you ship. It felt like a superpower. Within a year, the data started telling a different story.
A METR randomized controlled trial found that experienced open-source developers were 19% slower when using AI coding tools — despite predicting they'd be 24% faster, and still believing afterward they'd been 20% faster. A CodeRabbit analysis of 470 GitHub pull requests found AI co-authored code contained 1.7x more major issues than human-written code. And an Anthropic study of 52 engineers showed AI-assisted developers scored 17% lower on comprehension tests of their own codebases.
