With ‘vibecoding,’ AI can help anyone build an app

What is a vibe? Many know it when they see it. A vibe is a certain energy, a sense of familiarity, “a placeholder for an abstract quality that you can’t pin down,” as Kyle Chayka wrote in The New Yorker in 2021. Nominally short for vibration, “vibes” started spreading in countercultural circles in the 1960s, and the term has lately mushroomed into a ubiquitous stand-in. People vibe with one another, cherish good vibes, catch a vibe, vibe out.

And, in recent months, coders and laypeople alike have been “vibecoding,” or using conversational language to…