{
 "id": 39635,
 "slug": "vibe-coding-when-ai-writes-code-from-natural-language-prompts",
 "url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/vibe-coding-when-ai-writes-code-from-natural-language-prompts/",
 "language": "en",
 "title": "Vibe Coding — When AI Writes Code from Natural Language Prompts",
 "subtitle": "The trend of letting AI generate code from descriptions — tested by a developer who's been coding for decades.",
 "summary": "\"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.",
 "topics": [
  "AI",
  "creating",
  "programming"
 ],
 "created": "2026-04-03T20:55:33.099000+02:00",
 "updated": "2026-04-03T20:55:33.101000+02:00",
 "full_article_url": "https://willem.com/en/2025-04-15_vibe-coding/",
 "author": {
  "name": "Willem L. Middelkoop",
  "url": "https://willem.com"
 },
 "note": "A short distillation of a longer willem.com post. Not currently published on willem.com itself.",
 "answers_question": "What is vibe coding, judged by someone who has coded by hand for decades?",
 "text": "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.\nWillem 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.\nThe 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.\nFrom Willem's writing about code.",
 "markdown_url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/vibe-coding-when-ai-writes-code-from-natural-language-prompts/snippet.md"
}