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.
It’s an AI-powered chatbot that lives on her phone and is tailored to be kid-friendly, she said. When they use it together, they like to have voice conversations and will sometimes activate the camera function to show it things around the house.
The Tunisian mother, who’s now based in California, said the “robot friend” would help her tell bedtime stories and teach her daughter words in English — such as the names of animals they saw on TV — that she struggled to recall on her own. It also helped get her daughter to brush her teeth without protest.
“He makes these cute voices and he would convince her in like 30 seconds,” Ben Brahim Maazaoui said. “And he’d do something for me too: like for the brushing, he would say, ‘Mommy, can you please give her something to watch while you’re brushing her teeth?’ And I’m like, I did not think of that.”
The rise of such technologies has made software development accessible to people who’ve never earned computer science degrees or attended coding bootcamps. But they’re also limited in their capabilities, often producing outputs laden with errors that require the user to either fix the code themselves or to keep making requests and hope for the best.
Lenard Flören, a Germany-based art director at an advertising agency, said he quickly realized that trying to create his dream fitness app with one lengthy prompt would lead to a plethora of bugs that “neither ChatGPT nor my clueless self had any chance of solving.”
“Like every stereotypical, overconfident guy, I thought I could do it better [than the other apps on the market]. Which, obviously, I couldn’t,” said Flören, 28, who had no prior coding experience. “But I had already seen posts of people building apps with AI, so I thought I’d give it a try and see how far I could get.”
Flören, who ended up creating the personalized workout tracking app he wanted, said he learned to break the process down into bits. It helped, he said, when he began using the AI model as a tool to teach himself how to code along the way.
In recent months, vibe coders have proliferated in online communities, particularly on platforms like Reddit and Discord, where many like to share their projects and trade tips.
For Fay Robinett, the 8-year-old daughter of Cloudflare executive Ricky Robinett, building apps with AI has become a casual hobby outside of school. The first chatbot she built, coded using the AI tool Cursor, was one modeled after her own personality. Then, she made one that talks like Harry Potter. More recently, she used Anthropic’s agentic Claude Code tool to build a theme park simulator.
“I also made an app that was like a list that helped me do all my morning stuff, like brush my teeth and go to the bathroom. And I got points when I checked them off,” Robinett said. “So then if I got, like, 100 points, I could code with Daddy or something, and then if I got 1,000 points, I could go to Governors Island.”
Beyond sheer curiosity, a growing cohort of everyday people now also say they are trying to vibe-code their problems away.
Rishab Jain, a neuroscience student at Harvard University, said he used Replit, an automated app developer that uses an AI agent to code users’ requests, to build a smart rolodex to keep track of his network. He also created a program that translates ancient texts from his religion, Jainism, into English, so that diaspora practitioners who’ve lost touch with the language can read them.
“I totally imagine small problems here or there where you would usually say, ‘Hey, is there an app I can download for that? Oh, no, there’s not.’ Or maybe there is an app, but it costs $20 a month, something like that,” Jain, 20, said. “Now you can just make it and personalize it for you within maybe an hour. And I find that to be really fascinating.”
