Vibe Coding & Human Intent(Link)
Abstract
Software development is undergoing a fundamental transformation as vibe coding becomes widespread, with large portions of contemporary codebases now being generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The disconnect between rapid adoption and limited conceptual understanding highlights the need for an inquiry into this emerging paradigm. Drawing on an intent perspective and historical analysis, we define vibe coding as a software development paradigm where humans and Generative AI (GenAI) engage in collaborative flow to co-create software artifacts through natural language dialogue, shifting the mediation of developer intent from deterministic instruction to probabilistic inference. By intent mediation, we refer to the fundamental process through which developers translate their conceptual goals into representations that computational systems can execute. Our results show that vibe coding redistributes epistemic labor between humans and machines, shifting expertise from technical implementation toward collaborative orchestration. We identify key opportunities, including democratization, acceleration, and systemic leverage, alongside risks such as black-box codebases, responsibility gaps, and ecosystem bias. We conclude with a research agenda spanning human-, technology-, and organization-centered directions to guide future investigations of this paradigm.
Title: Vibe Coding as a Reconfiguration of Intent Mediation in Software Development
- Who: Christian Meske, Tobias Hermanns, and team (University researchers).
- What: An academic paper defining “vibe coding” (a term coined by Andrej Karpathy in 2025) as a shift where programmers stop writing code line-by-line and instead “orchestrate” AI using natural language and intuition.
- Where: Published in IEEE Access (and available via ResearchGate).
- When: 2025.
- Why: To analyze how AI is changing programming from a technical skill into a “collaborative flow,” where the human provides the intent and the machine handles the logic.
- Citation: Meske, Christian, et al. “Vibe Coding as a Reconfiguration of Intent Mediation in Software Development: Definition, Implications, and Research Agenda.” ArXiv.org, 2025, arxiv.org/abs/2507.21928.
Key Takeaway: Vibe coding isn’t just “lazy coding”; it is a cultural shift that “flattens” the interface between human thought and machine execution, raising questions about skill atrophy and the future of human expertise.
