In what can only be described as the tech world’s latest attempt to justify six-figure salaries while simultaneously avoiding actual work, Deep Learning AI founder Andrew Ng has partnered with Replit to launch “Vibe Coding 101” – an immersive 94-minute video course teaching developers the sacred art of delegating their entire job to AI while maintaining the appearance of irreplaceability.
The course, announced in March 2025, features Replit President Michele Catasta and Head of Developer Relations Matt Palmer, who guide aspiring “vibe coders” through the revolutionary process of typing vague instructions to an AI and then taking credit for whatever comes out – a skill set previously known as “management.”
“AI coding agents are changing how we write code,” explained Ng in a LinkedIn post that caused thousands of actual software engineers to break into cold sweats simultaneously. “‘Vibe coding’ refers to a growing practice where you might barely look at the generated code, and instead focus on the architecture and features of your application.”1
Translation: Why bother understanding what’s under the hood when you can simply channel the energetic essence of a developer while maintaining plausible deniability for any resulting catastrophic system failures?
From Meme to Mainstream: The Gospel According to Saint Karpathy
What began as an inside joke among cynical developers has rapidly morphed into Silicon Valley’s newest religion. The term “vibe coding” was originally coined by former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy as a tongue-in-cheek description of letting AI do the heavy lifting while humans focus on higher-level concerns.2
Merely weeks later, job listings for “Vibe Coders” began appearing on recruitment sites, with one particularly dystopian posting requiring candidates to be “ready to grind long hours, including weekends” while also declaring that “at least 50% of the code you write right now should be done by AI; Vibe coding experience is non-negotiable.”3
Nothing says “groundbreaking innovation” quite like working 80-hour weeks to watch an AI write half your code while you desperately try to understand what it’s doing. All to “automate debt collection calls for banks,” because if there’s one thing the world desperately needs, it’s more efficient ways to harass people who can’t pay their medical bills.
The Five Sacred Skills of Vibe Enlightenment
According to the course materials, mastering vibe coding requires developing five divine skills: “Thinking, Using Frameworks, Checkpoints, Debugging, and Providing Context.”4
Yes, “Thinking” is now considered a specialized skill worthy of being explicitly taught in a professional development course. Next semester, they’ll be offering “Breathing 101: How to Keep Your Brain Oxygenated During Meetings” and “Blinking: The Revolutionary Technique for Preventing Your Eyeballs from Drying Out.”
Palmer, whose LinkedIn demonstrates a dazzling career trajectory from “Valuation Analyst” to “Senior Analytics Engineer” to suddenly becoming the world’s foremost authority on a programming paradigm that didn’t exist three months ago, enthusiastically proclaimed the course launch on social media: “We’ll cover everything you need to know to start vibe coding on Replit. Best part? It’s FREE.”5
Free, that is, until your company realizes that all your code consists of AI-generated ramen noodles that no human can maintain, at which point the cost becomes your entire engineering department’s collective sanity.
Principles of Agentic Code Development (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Black Box)
The course teaches such revolutionary concepts as “being precise,” “giving agents one task at a time,” and “making prompts specific” – groundbreaking insights that definitely couldn’t have been discovered by anyone spending five minutes actually trying to use ChatGPT.6
Particularly enlightening is the principle of “keeping projects tidy,” which roughly translates to “organizing the code you didn’t write and don’t understand so that when it inevitably breaks, you can at least pretend you know where to look first.”
The masterclass culminates in students building two applications: a website performance analyzer and a national park ranking app. These projects were specifically chosen because they represent the perfect balance of “impressive enough to put on your portfolio” and “simple enough that the AI won’t completely hallucinate the entire implementation.”
Technical Debt? More Like Technical Credit Score
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the vibe coding phenomenon is its blatant disregard for the inevitable accumulation of technical debt – a concern raised by spoilsport critics who apparently hate fun and innovation.
“Technical debt from vibe coding manifests in several distinct ways,” warns a killjoy blog post from Zencoder.ai. “First, inconsistent coding patterns emerge as AI generates solutions based on different prompts without a unified architectural vision. This creates a patchwork codebase where similar problems are solved in dissimilar ways.”7
This criticism fundamentally misunderstands that inconsistency is a feature, not a bug. After all, when your codebase looks like it was written by seven different developers with conflicting architectural philosophies, it becomes impossible for management to determine who’s responsible for failures – the perfect job security strategy.
Furthermore, as noted by CodingIT, “A team that leans too heavily on AI might seem efficient at first, but if they’re constantly revisiting past work and fixing AI-generated messes, they’re not moving forward, they’re just running in circles.” This entirely misses the point that running in circles is exactly what most tech companies excel at – just ask anyone who’s lived through three complete rewrites of the same system within five years.
Silicon Valley’s Ouroboros: The Job Eating Itself
What’s most brilliant about vibe coding is how it perfectly encapsulates the tech industry’s love affair with solving problems created by the previous solutions to problems that didn’t actually exist.
“AI-forward means embracing AI’s evolving capabilities – not just as tools, but as autonomous partners that anticipate our needs, streamline complex tasks, and empower us to focus more deeply on creative vision and strategic thinking,” explains Catasta, sounding suspiciously like someone who’s used an AI to generate his own talking points.8
One cannot help but marvel at the elegant recursion: We’ve created AI to help us write code that creates more AI that helps us write more code, all while steadily eliminating the need for humans to understand what any of that code actually does. It’s almost poetic, in a “civilization slowly surrendering its comprehension of its own tools” sort of way.
From Developer to Digital Shaman
The true genius of vibe coding – and what Ng’s course really sells – is the transformation of the software developer from a technical practitioner into a sort of digital shaman, channeling the mystic energies of artificial intelligence through carefully crafted incantations known as “prompts.”
“I code frequently using LLMs,” Ng confesses, “and asking an LLM to do everything in one shot usually does not work. I’ll typically take a problem, partition it into manageable modules, spend time creating prompts to specify each module, and use the model to produce the code one module at a time, and test/debug each module before moving on.”9
This description bears an uncanny resemblance to what developers used to call “programming,” except now you’re typing your specifications into an AI instead of implementing them yourself – a distinction as meaningful as the difference between asking someone to make you a sandwich and writing detailed instructions on sandwich-making for your butler.
The Skeptics’ Corner: Voices Crying in the Digital Wilderness
Not everyone has embraced the gospel of vibe. Some heretics persist in questioning whether surrendering comprehension of your codebase to a black box that once confidently informed a user that Helsinki is the capital of Sweden is truly the future of software engineering.
“Vibe Coding is not the future,” argues LinkedIn user Millan Singh. “The irony that no one seems to be pointing out is that YC is HEAVILY invested in the AI bubble, so them putting out a video about how Vibe Coding is the future is a clear conflict of interest.”10
Singh further points out that AI models struggle with ingesting large codebases, noting that “10,000 lines of code is a ton of context to ingest… and that’s a tiny codebase. The last company I worked for had a 450,000 line codebase.”
Another LinkedIn user, whose name has been metaphorically etched into the Blockchain of Truth, cuts to the heart of the matter: “Who needs requirements when you have vibes? Thinking too much? Bad vibes. Just start typing. If the code runs, it’s correct (for now). Tests? Lame. If it feels right, ship it. If it breaks, it wasn’t meant to be.”
The Educational-Industrial Complex Strikes Again
The final piece of this perfectly constructed absurdity is how quickly the educational-industrial complex mobilized to monetize a concept that began as a joke. Within weeks of Karpathy’s initial tweet, Deep Learning AI had produced a fully formed course, complete with marketing materials proclaiming it as the future of development.
This impressive speed suggests either remarkable foresight or that the course itself was largely produced through – you guessed it – vibe coding. One can only imagine the conversation:
“Hey Gemini, create me a comprehensive educational course about getting you to write code for me.”
“I’d be happy to create a course about using AI to generate code! Here’s a 94-minute video series that somehow manages to stretch ‘write better prompts’ into seven distinct lessons.”
The circularity is perfect, the recursion sublime. We are teaching humans how to teach machines to do what humans used to do, using machines to create the teaching materials. If Jorge Luis Borges were alive today, he’d either be impressed or filing copyright infringement claims.
So what do you think, fellow digital wanderers? Have you embraced the vibe, or are you still clinging to the antiquated notion that programmers should understand the code they’re responsible for? Are you ready to transcend mere coding and ascend to the higher plane of prompt engineering? Share your thoughts below-unless, of course, you’ve already outsourced your opinion formation to ChatGPT.
Support TechOnion’s Vibe Journalism
If you found this article enlightening, consider donating to TechOnion using our new AI-powered payment system. Simply think about sending us money while facing north and holding your credit card up to the moon, and our advanced algorithms will extract whatever amount feels right from your account. Don't worry about the exact sum-just vibe with it. (For legal reasons, this is what our lawyers call "a joke." Please use the actual payment button below, which was coded by a human developer who is now seeking therapy.)
References
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrewyng_new-short-course-vibe-coding-101-with-replit-activity-7310695523533885440-do3O ↩︎
- https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-ai-learn-vibe-coding-course-replit-2025-3 ↩︎
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43451958 ↩︎
- https://www.educationnext.in/posts/andrew-ng-launches-a-course-on-vibe-coding ↩︎
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matt-palmer_how-i-feel-on-course-launch-week-deeplearningais-activity-7309922003602354176-LWf7 ↩︎
- https://www.deeplearning.ai/short-courses/vibe-coding-101-with-replit/ ↩︎
- https://zencoder.ai/blog/vibe-coding-risks ↩︎
- https://www.turing.com/blog/ai-forward-with-michele-catasta ↩︎
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrewyng_new-short-course-vibe-coding-101-with-replit-activity-7310695523533885440-do3O ↩︎
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/millansingh_vibe-coding-is-not-the-future-the-irony-activity-7306137591530082306-ub37 ↩︎
