For many people, coding is about telling a computer what he has to do and the computer repeatedly performs those precise actions. With the rise of AI tools such as Chatgpt, it is now possible for someone to describe a program in English and to have the AI model translated into working code without ever understanding how the code works. Former OpenAi researcher Andrej Karpathy recently gave this practice a name – “atmospheric coding” – and it gets a grip in technical circles.
The technology, made possible by large language models (LLMS) from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, has attracted the attention to the possible lowering of the barrier for access to software recreation. But there are still questions about whether the approach can reliably produce code that is suitable for applications in practice, even as tools such as cursor composer, Github Copilot and Replit Agent increasingly make the process accessible to non-programmers.
Instead of being about control and precision, it's all about vomiting the power to the current. On 2 February, Karpathy introduced the term in a message about X and wrote: “There is a new type of coding that I call 'vibe coding', where you fully admit to the Vibes, embrace exponentals and forget that the code even exists.” He deliberately described the process in casual terms: “I just see things, say things, run things and copy, and it usually works.”
A screenshot of Karpathy's original X post about atmospheric coding from 2 February 2025.
Credit: Andrej Karpathy / X
While the atmospheric coding, if an error occurs, you feed it back in the AI model, accepts the changes, it hopes that it works and repeats the process. Karpathy's technology is in stark contrast to traditional best practices for software development, which usually emphasize a careful planning, testing and understanding of implementation data.
As Karpathy Humoristic recognizes in its original post, the approach for the ultimate lazy programmer experience is: “I ask for the stupidest things, such as' the filling on the sidebar with half 'decreasing' because I am too lazy to find it myself.
