What Is Vibe Coding? The Shift from Implementation to Intention

The act of “writing code” is changing.

More precisely: the act is shifting from “writing code” to “describing what you want to build.” I feel this every day since I started using Claude Code. And in April 2026, the change finally got a name — Vibe Coding.

Vibe Coding Gets an Academic Definition

UX researchers Christian Hohn and Kurt Loydl published a paper in the academic journal i-com defining Vibe Coding as:

“A practical working mode for producing functional prototypes and software artifacts through iterative natural-language dialogue with LLMs.”

What stands out is the framing: not a “technological rupture,” but a “shift in working mode.” Programming hasn’t disappeared. Its center of gravity has simply moved — from implementation to intention. That, the paper argues, is the essence of Vibe Coding.

The Moment I Realized I Was Already Doing It

Reading the paper, I had an immediate sense of recognition: someone had just named what I do every day.

Take the Obsidian digest automation system I use. It fetches RSS from PubMed, triages articles by importance, generates notes in Obsidian, and posts them to Slack. I didn’t “write” this system. I described what I wanted, then iterated: “this part is off,” “add this feature.” I never fully understood every line of the code — I was only watching the gap between the behavior I observed and the intention I held.

That is exactly “intention over implementation.”

Vibe Coding Isn’t About Taking Shortcuts

This is commonly misunderstood: Vibe Coding isn’t a technique for offloading all coding to AI and coasting.

The paper’s authors — writing as UX practitioners drawing on real project experience — identify the capabilities Vibe Coding actually demands:

• The ability to clearly articulate what you want to build
• The ability to judge from the output whether something is wrong
• The ability to specify what needs to be fixed

The ability to write code hasn’t become unnecessary. The ability to read and evaluate code has become more important. It feels less like moving from “writing” to “not writing,” and more like moving from “writing” to “editing.”

Anthropic Is Pointing the Same Direction

Not coincidentally, Anthropic released a major redesign of the Claude Code desktop app on the same day. The headline change: a UI rebuilt around the assumption that you’ll be running multiple Claude sessions in parallel.

A new sidebar lets you manage work across multiple projects, and a “side chat” feature lets you ask tangential questions without interrupting your main task.

The design philosophy has shifted from “ask Claude to do one thing” to “manage multiple Claudes running in parallel.” What users need is no longer hands that write code — it’s a director’s eye that orchestrates multiple agents.

The Paradox: Experienced Developers Have the Edge

Around the same time, Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson reportedly argued that the developers best suited to the AI agent era are not beginners — they’re veterans.

At first glance, paradoxical. But the logic is clear. What Vibe Coding demands most is the ability to judge the quality of generated code, and that ability only accumulates through experience. An LLM moves like a capable junior engineer — fast and willing. But without the senior engineer’s instinct — “something’s off here” — you can’t actually get value from the output.

I’m not an engineer, but I feel I’ve slowly developed the eye for telling whether what’s been built is working. That’s less about knowing code and more about holding a precise picture of what I want to build, and a sense for whether the result matches it.

What Vibe Coding Changes — and What It Doesn’t

Let me be honest about what I actually think.

Vibe Coding will accelerate the era where anyone can build software. But whether anyone can build good software is a separate question.

The judgment to decide what to build, the critical eye to evaluate what you’ve built, the ability to articulate user problems precisely — these skills aren’t replaced by Vibe Coding. If anything, as implementation costs fall, “what to build” becomes the direct determinant of product quality. The decision is the product.

We’re entering an era where intention creates implementation. Sharpening the resolution of that intention is my next challenge.

Reference: Christian Hohn, Kurt Loydl “Vibe Coding: intention instead of implementation” (i-com, 2026)