Vibe Coding Six Months Later The Honeymoon S Over

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Jan 20, 2026, 4:56 AM

vibe coding six months later the honeymoon s over

We’re so glad you’re here. You can expect all the best TNS content to arrive Monday through Friday to keep you on top of the news and at the top of your game. Check your inbox for a confirmation email where you can adjust your preferences and even join additional groups. Follow TNS on your favorite social media networks. Check out the latest featured and trending stories while you wait for your first TNS newsletter. When vibe coding first landed in dev circles, it felt like the cool kid at the party.

Suddenly, everyone is talking about ditching rigid structures, coding with intuition and letting creativity lead instead of obsessing over linters and architecture diagrams. When vibe coding first landed in dev circles, it felt like the cool kid at the party. Suddenly, everyone is talking about ditching rigid structures, coding with intuition and letting creativity lead instead of obsessing over linters and architecture diagrams. The promise was intoxicating: Build faster, worry less and get the same feeling as you would when using open source code. But six months down the line, the champagne fizz is gone. Developers are realizing that while vibe coding makes prototyping fun, it also leaves behind some gnarly…

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When vibe coding first landed in dev circles, it felt like the cool kid at the party. Suddenly, everyone is talking about ditching rigid structures, coding with intuition and letting creativity lead instead of obsessing over linters and architecture diagrams. The promise was intoxicating: Build faster, worry less and get the same feeling as you would when using open source code. But six months down the line, the champagne fizz is gone. Developers are realizing that while vibe coding makes prototyping fun, it also leaves behind some gnarly… Vibe coding was, remarkably, named word of the year by the Collins English Dictionary at the start of November 2025 — pretty good going for a term that was only coined in February.

We first discussed it on the Technology Podcast back in April, and, given its prominence in the collective lexicon this year, thought we should revisit and reflect on the topic as 2025 draws to... Lots has happened in the intervening months: MCP adoption, the evolution of agentic coding tools and practices like context engineering have had a significant impact on the way the world is thinking about and... To talk about it all and reflect on the implications, Thoughtworkers and regular podcast hosts Prem Chandrasekaran, Lilly Ryan and Neal Ford reconvened for a follow up to our April conversation. Taking in everything from the term's semantic slipperiness, its security risks and the challenges of maintenance, this is a discussion that, despite going deep into vibe coding, also touches on a huge range of... Before we enter 2026, looking back on the good, bad and the ugly of the last 12 months of experimentation is essential if we're to build better software for the world in the future. This episode aims to be a guide through that process.

Prem Chandrasekaran: Hello, everyone. Welcome to yet another episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast. My name is Prem. I'm one of the regular hosts on the podcast. I've got two of my colleagues here, Lilly and Neal. Do you folks want to introduce yourselves?

Home » Website Design + Optimization » Vibeless Coding: Life After the Vibe Coding Honeymoon Generative AIStrategy CornerWebsite Design + Optimization In the tidal surge of Vibe Coding, we’ve enjoyed an exhilarating wave of effortless creativity. AI-driven development promised rapid, intuitive programming with mere prompts. Developers no longer wrestled with syntax; simply describing their vision allowed algorithms to craft solutions. Yet, as the tide recedes, the hidden cost emerges starkly: digital barnacles accumulating beneath our sleek, AI-generated software.

Barnacles—small, unnoticed crustaceans—eventually degrade ship performance, slowing progress and demanding constant maintenance. Similarly, Vibe Coding results in subtle layers of opaque logic, undocumented decisions, and tangled dependencies that quietly attach themselves to your codebase. Definition: Coding with the intuitive power of AI, rapidly creating software simply by describing your vision. It’s effortless, thrilling, and feels like the honeymoon of software development—quick results, creative freedom, and the sense that code practically writes itself.Coined: Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 “the hottest new programming language is English” In February 2025, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy coined a term that would define and divide the developer community for months to come. He called it “vibe coding”: fully giving in to the vibes, embracing exponentials, and forgetting that the code even exists.

Vibe coding was fast, fun, and chaotic.It’s what gave us hundreds of AI wrappers, weekend hacks, and viral demos. People weren’t building products, they were building proofs of possibility.A vibe coder could assemble a prototype in hours and make it look like magic. And that was fine… until users asked for reliability, privacy, and scale. But just eight months later, the party is over, not because the models stopped improving, but because the projects built on vibes never followed the real process of building a product. We’re so glad you’re here. You can expect all the best TNS content to arrive Monday through Friday to keep you on top of the news and at the top of your game.

Check your inbox for a confirmation email where you can adjust your preferences and even join additional groups. When vibe coding first landed in dev circles, it felt like the cool kid at the party. Suddenly, everyone is talking about ditching rigid structures, coding with intuition and letting creativity lead instead of obsessing over linters and architecture diagrams. The promise was intoxicating: Build faster, worry less and get the same feeling as you would when using open source code. But six months down the line, the champagne fizz is gone. Developers are realizing that while vibe coding makes prototyping fun, it also leaves behind some gnarly hangovers once the real work begins.

I’m not going to dunk on the trend or crown it as a savior — my goal is to ask the tough questions. Where does vibe coding shine? Where does it implode? And what happens when you actually try to run a serious project built on pure vibes? Let’s talk about what vibe coding looks like after the novelty wears off. This week, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the creator of the Claude language model, made a bold prediction that within six months, 90% of all code will be written by AI.

Simultaneously, the concept of "vibe coding" has surged in popularity, becoming one of the most searched terms in AI and overtaking "prompt engineering" on Google Trends. Thousands of videos, blogs, and discussions are exploring this new approach to building software. Additionally, AI startups like Cursor have experienced explosive growth, with Cursor reportedly achieving a 9,900% increase in 12 months, making it one of the fastest companies to reach $100 million in revenue. Clearly, the way we build software is evolving, but the speed of this transformation and its implications for developers remain hotly debated topics. This is one of the most competitive and significant implementations of... In today's episode, I'll discuss Dario Amodei's claim, the rise of vibe coding, and what these developments could mean for business and technology. This is In The Loop with Jack Houghton.

ICYMI: Six months after the hype began, is vibe coding sustainable? We look at the pros and cons, and why blending vibes with structure is key. By Alexander T. Williams

Vibe Coding Six Months Later The Honeymoon S Over

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