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Dr. Ryan Ries here. I’m on vacation right now but wanted to make sure I had a Matrix for you this week.
There’s a recent trend I've been tracking that's causing quite the stir in AI and software development circles that I figured we could talk about this week.
What is Vibe Coding?
If you haven't heard the term "vibe coding" yet, it's the latest buzzword sweeping through Silicon Valley.
Coined by Andrej Karpathy (former Tesla AI director and OpenAI co-founder) in February, it refers to a different approach to programming where developers essentially describe what they want in natural language and let AI generate the actual code.
As Karpathy put it, "It's not really coding - I just see things, say things, run things, and copy-paste things, and it mostly works."
The key distinction here is that vibe coding often involves accepting code without fully understanding its inner workings – you're going with the vibes, as the kids say.
Is This Really the Future?
Vibe coding is gaining serious traction. It even has its own Wikipedia page!
Y Combinator reported that 25% of startups in its Winter 2025 batch have codebases that are 95% AI-generated. That's a staggering shift in how software gets built!
One platform at the forefront of this movement is Cursor, which bills itself as "The AI Code Editor" designed to make developers "extraordinarily productive."
While they don't explicitly market themselves as a vibe coding platform, their approach aligns perfectly with the concept – letting users write and update code through simple prompts and natural language instructions.
My Take: Proceed with Caution
As someone who's been in data science and AI for over two decades, I see both promise and peril here.
For quick prototypes, weekend projects, or certain use cases where speed trumps robustness, vibe coding is amazing.
It's democratizing software development in ways we've never seen before – even non-programmers can now build functional applications.
However, I'll be the first to say that relying on code you don't fully understand is risky for production systems.
The real magic happens when we find the right balance – using AI to accelerate and augment human developers rather than replace their understanding. Amazon Q for Developers does a great job with this.
Have you experimented with vibe coding or tools like Cursor? Reply and let me know – I'm curious about your experience with this trend.
Until next time,
Ryan Ries
Now, here's our weekly AI-generated image & the prompt I used.
"Generate an image of a man on the beach playing volleyball with muppets. The man is wearing a gray tshirt and the shirt says AWS on the front. Everyone is having a good time and enjoying the beautiful day."
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