Vibe Coding — When AI Writes Code from Natural Language Prompts

The trend of letting AI generate code from descriptions — tested by a developer who's been coding for decades.

"Vibe coding" is the practice of describing what you want in natural language and letting an AI write the code. Willem — who has been writing code by hand for decades — tried it himself and has thoughts.

The term "vibe coding" was popularised by Pieter Levels — the idea that you can build software by describing what you want and letting an AI (GPT, Claude, Copilot) write the actual code. You don't need to understand the code. You just need to describe the vibe.

Willem tried it — and found that prompting AI with code is far more effective than prompting with natural language. When you describe what you want in words, the AI guesses. When you show it existing code and ask for a specific modification, it performs remarkably well.

The deeper observation: vibe coding works for prototypes and throwaway scripts. For production software — the kind that runs for years and needs to be maintained — understanding every line matters. The same philosophy behind self-hosting and hand-built websites applies: if you don't understand it, you can't fix it.

From Willem's writing about code.