👨‍💻 "Vibe Coding" Huh? 🫨

"Just tell AI what you want and forget coding matter.

That's the premise behind "vibe coding" - Silicon Valley's latest obsession that's changing how software gets built, who can build it, and how quickly ideas become reality.

Haven’t heard the term yet? Don’t worry - someone posing as your local AI expert is bound to drop it in your next “Strategy” meeting.

Vibe coding was coined just a couple of months ago in February 2025 by top AI researcher Andrej Karpathy (Andrej has done some incredible things for AI - so more to come about him) but it's already reshaping how businesses approach software development.

What Is Vibe Coding, Exactly? 💭

What It Is: Vibe coding is an AI-assisted approach where you "fully give in to the vibes" and let AI generate software based on your plain-English descriptions instead of writing code yourself.

➡️ While we are on the subject of vibes - did you subscribe to The Context Window’s play list yet?🤔 

In simple terms: Instead of spending months learning some complicated coding language, you just tell an AI what you want to build, and it handles the rest. When issues arise, you describe the problem, and the AI fixes it. This includes testing the product and even deploying it into a production ready state.

Why Business Leaders Should Care 👔

Let’s be honest - unless you are the head of a technology or product team, you probably don’t pay much attention to (nor should you) to the development process or coding language; but I think now you should. Here’s why:

✅ Democratized software creation – Anyone on your team can now build custom tools without coding skills. That marketing campaign tracker your team keeps asking for? They could potentially build it themselves.

✅ Rapid prototyping on steroids – Move from idea to working prototype in hours instead of weeks, dramatically accelerating your time-to-market. Yes - again someone non-techy could build a prototype.

✅ Reduced development costs – Build more with smaller teams, or enable your existing teams to be dramatically more productive.

✅ Software for one – Create personalized tools for specific needs that would never justify traditional development resources. Who hasn’t wanted this? 😅

According to Y Combinator, about 25% of their Winter 2025 startup batch have codebases that are 95% AI-generated. That's a seismic shift happening right now.

The Tools Making It Possible 🛠️

So if ‘vibe coding’ is something you want to enable your team with, check out some of these popular AI tools:

1. Cursor – An AI-powered code editor that's become the go-to for many developers. It understands your entire codebase and can make sweeping changes with simple commands.

2. Replit Agent – Great for creators who want flexibility to build full-stack applications (frontend, backend, database) with automatic deployment.

3. Windsurf IDE – Integrates multiple AI models to handle different aspects of the development process.

4. Claude Artifacts – For simple web apps and visualizations with strong safety controls.

The Catches (Because There Are Always Catches) ⚠️

Before you call your next all-hands and tell everyone they are going to be programmers take note of the following:

❌ Security risks – Vibing your way to production code can introduce vulnerabilities when developers don't understand what the AI actually wrote.

❌ Maintenance challenges – When no one fully understands the codebase, troubleshooting and improvements become more difficult over time.

❌ Not (yet) suitable for mission-critical applications – Would you trust a bridge built by an architect who couldn't explain how the support beams work?

❌ Still needs human guidance – The quality of what you get depends heavily on how well you can describe what you want.

❌ It’s not perfect – Start playing around with these tools and you will soon learn that the AI sometimes just can’t ‘get it’ and you end up with the same error / issue a 100 times over.

Should You Use Vibe Coding In Your Business? 🤔

🔹 If you need quick prototypes to test market ideas → ✅ Yes. Speed trumps perfection when validating concepts.

🔹 If you're building critical infrastructure or working in highly secure / regulated systems → ❌ No. Some things still require deep technical understanding.

🔹 If your team constantly needs custom tools or on-off solutions → ✅ Yes. Empower team members to build their own solutions.

🔹 If you're a non-technical founder with great ideas → ✅ Yes. This could be your shortcut to building/ prototyping without hiring a tech resource.

🔹 If you're expecting very complex software to be created by one or two people on your team → ❌ No. Let’s keep our expectations realistic.

Final Thoughts 💡

Tech buzzword aside, Vibe coding to represents a fundamental shift in who can create software and how quickly they can do it. It’s going to be a huge unlock for many teams and individuals.

It’s unlikely to replace good software engineering entirely (at least not yet), it's lowering the barriers that have traditionally kept non-developers from building their ideas.

The next few years will reveal whether vibe coding becomes the new standard or remains a complementary approach.

As a business leader, you should start to understand how impactful this can be and begin to enable your teams to employ vibe coding.

Are you experimenting with vibe coding in your organization? Let me know what you think—reply to this email or drop a comment on X (@hashisiva).

💡 We are out of tokens for this week’s Context Window! 

Thanks for reading!

P.S. Just as spreadsheets in the 1980s gave non-programmers the power to build financial models, vibe coding is giving everyone the ability to create software.

The question isn't whether you'll use it, but when and how. 🚀