From Vibe Coding to Vibe Creating

A scene from 2026

A woman in Seoul is cutting the final act of a short film she made in three days. No crew. No editing suite. No budget to speak of. She's directing an AI — describing the cut she wants, the emotional weight of the transition, the way the light should feel when the door opens — and the AI is building it. She's not a filmmaker by training. She's a brand strategist. She always had this story. Until now, she never had a way to tell it at that level.

In the same moment, somewhere in São Paulo, a musician who plays no instruments is composing a piece for string quartet. He's describing the tension he wants in the second movement, the specific melancholy of late afternoon in November, the way the cello should feel like it's asking a question the violin won't answer. The AI writes the score. He refines it. Then refines it again.

Neither of them would call what they're doing "vibe coding." There's no code involved. But they're doing the same thing Andrej Karpathy described in that February tweet. The same workflow, the same paradigm, the same relationship between human and machine. Describe. Generate. Steer. Repeat.

Someone had to name it. That's what this is about.

The Karpathy moment

February 2nd, 2025. Andrej Karpathy — former director of AI at Tesla, one of the architects of modern deep learning — posted a note on X about how he'd been building a side project. He wasn't writing the code. He was describing what he wanted, letting the LLM build it, and barely looking at what it output. He called the mode he was in: vibe coding.

"There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's not a big deal if it temporarily doesn't work or builds up a bit of technical debt."

Andrej Karpathy, February 2, 2025

The tweet got 4.5 million impressions within 48 hours. Collins Dictionary added "vibe coding" to its Word of the Year shortlist. Within three weeks, a survey of developers showed 82% had tried the approach at least once. The term crystallized something people were already doing but hadn't named.

The word "vibe" was doing specific work there. Not "AI coding." Not "prompt-based coding." Vibe. It captured the intentional looseness, the give-in quality, the shift from controlling every line to directing the overall feeling. The vibes-first approach. Let the machine handle execution. You handle intention.

Within months, a billion-dollar industry had organized around it. Tools, courses, communities, job titles. "Vibe coder" became a real thing people put on their LinkedIn. Platforms optimized for it. Y Combinator saw 25% of its Winter 2025 batch built primarily through vibe coding sessions. The meme became infrastructure.

But something else was happening in parallel. Something nobody at the center of the vibe coding conversation seemed to notice, or at least didn't name.

The expansion beyond code

The pattern didn't stay in software. It never does. The best mental models are parasitic — they find their way into every adjacent territory until the original container seems too small to hold them.

By mid-2025, designers were doing it. They weren't crafting pixels. They were describing visual systems to Midjourney, Firefly, and DALL-E 3 — the mood of a brand, the weight of a typeface, the exact shade of silence between colors. Vibe designing wasn't a coined term yet. But the practice was everywhere.

Marketers were doing it with campaigns. Architects with spatial concepts. Game designers with entire world systems. Musicians with compositions they could hear internally but couldn't play. Writers who had always known what they wanted to say but struggled with the execution of getting it out.

Each one was discovering the same thing Karpathy had stumbled into: the bottleneck wasn't creativity. It never was. The bottleneck was execution. And AI had just dissolved it.

Here's how the expansion tracked:

Each new domain spawned its own tools, its own practitioners, its own vocabulary. But something fundamental connected all of them. Same workflow. Same cognitive shift. Same relationship between vision and execution.

The pattern nobody named

Here's what was actually happening across every discipline, stated plainly:

The human provides the intention. The AI provides the execution. The human steers the result. Repeat until done.

That's the whole thing. It applies identically whether you're building an app, composing a film score, designing a brand, or writing a novel. The domain changes. The tools change. The expertise required changes. But the fundamental dynamic is identical.

Look at how the translation works across disciplines:

The problem is that everyone was treating these as separate things. The vibe coding community was in one corner. The vibe designing community in another. Filmmakers didn't think they had anything in common with software developers just because they were both directing AI. There was no unifying frame.

No umbrella.

Why Vibe Creating was the missing term

Every movement needs a name. Not because naming is everything, but because naming is the first step to building something on top of it. When you name a thing, you can map it. When you map it, you can teach it. When you teach it, it compounds.

Vibe Creating is the meta-discipline. The category that holds all the verticals. It says: if you are directing AI to produce professional-grade creative work in any discipline, you are Vibe Creating. The domain is irrelevant. The paradigm is what matters.

This isn't semantic gymnastics. It has real implications. Because once you see that all these disciplines share a common foundation, you realize that the skills that matter most are domain-agnostic: taste, judgment, narrative understanding, cultural awareness, the ability to know when something is right and when it isn't.

You also realize that a single person can now operate across multiple disciplines at a professional level simultaneously. Which leads us to the most interesting structural consequence of this entire shift.

The Vibe Trilogy

There's a specific combination of disciplines that's changing what a single creative person can do. We call it the Vibe Trilogy: Vibe Coding + Vibe Designing + Vibe Marketing.

This is why one-person startups are suddenly competitive with five-person teams. This is why independent creators are building products that look like they came out of a funded studio. The trilogy has made the solo operator viable at a level that simply wasn't possible before.

But the trilogy is just the entry point. The full picture is fourteen-plus disciplines and counting. Every creative field is developing its vibe version. The trilogy is where most people are starting. The rest is where the frontier is.

When Karpathy said it was passé

In February 2026, a year after coining the term, Andrej Karpathy posted again. He said vibe coding was "already starting to feel a bit passé." Not as a dismissal — as a marker of how fast the adoption curve had moved. What was avant-garde in early 2025 had become standard practice by early 2026. The paradigm had normalized.

That's what happens when a new way of working actually works. It stops feeling new. It just becomes how you work.

But Karpathy's comment pointed at something important: if vibe coding has already normalized within software, what's the leading edge now? The answer, visible from any vantage point in early 2026, is clear. The leading edge is every creative discipline that's still in the vibe-coding-in-early-2025 moment: aware of the paradigm, beginning to adopt it, but without consolidated tools, communities, or frameworks around it.

Filmmaking. Music. Advertising. Architecture. Game design. These are all where software was a year ago. And the movement in each of them is already accelerating.

The disciplines that come next are bigger than coding ever was

Here's a number worth sitting with. The global software development market is roughly $650 billion. The global creative industries — film, music, advertising, architecture, game design, publishing, visual art — total more than $2 trillion. Three times larger.

Vibe coding disrupted the smaller market first because software was closest to the AI substrate — the tools already lived in text, the practitioners were already technically literate, the adoption friction was low. But the larger wave is just forming.

When every filmmaker, every musician, every advertising creative director, every architect has access to the same paradigm that vibe coding gave developers, the creative landscape transforms in ways that make the past year look like a preview. A warm-up act.

The woman in Seoul finishing her film. The musician in São Paulo hearing what he's always heard. These aren't edge cases. They're early signals of the actual wave. And the wave doesn't have a name yet — at least, not one that's widely used.

We think it should be called what it is: Vibe Creating.

Everything that's happening is part of the same story. Karpathy's tweet was the first sentence. We're still in the early chapters.

— IMAJIM