Vibe coding

In this program you will not "write" code. You will make your work by telling Cursor what to do in words. This way of working got the name "vibe coding" in early 2025, and it has since become a research topic, with dozens of papers published in 2025 and 2026. The six chapters here are drawn from those papers and keep only what a person making artwork needs.

1. What vibe coding is: definitions, the loop, and how far to trust it
2. Where it is heading: where it is heading, five forces and open questions
3. Names that already existed: bricolage, end-user programming, casual creators, the names that already existed
4. When making artwork: what the papers that studied artists and creative coders say
5. How to do it well: a list of practices backed by evidence
6. Traps: the traps (rolling the dice, the verification gap, homogenization, security)
7. References: 49 references

The six chapters in one paragraph

Vibe coding is a loop: you state an intent, code appears, you run it, and you speak again [2][4]. What is new is the tool, and the attitude is older. Bricolage, where you keep adjusting a version that always runs [37], end-user programming, where the goal lies elsewhere and the program is only a means [39], and casual creators, where the pleasure of exploring comes before the result [38], had already described it. The papers that studied artists repeat two points. Make big leaps with words and fine adjustments by hand [21][23]. And decide the idea yourself first and only hand over the implementation, so that creative moments do not shrink [25]. Beginners get stuck on verification more than on prompts: pasting the error back in again and again without looking at the result ("rolling the dice") [13], agents that report everything is done when only part is [11][29], and the habit of fixating on the first result [14][24]. That is why most of the practice list is about how to look more than how to make. The questions ahead come down to one: faced with tools that pull toward the average, how do you make what the average cannot do the place of your work [45][47].