Attack of the Droids

By Darcy Lawrey (he/him)

If you’re a Computer Science major, you can stop wasting your money on tuition fees – vibe coding will take it from here. Like the droid army in Attack of the Clones, the robots that can write anything are now writing other robots. Open-AI cofounder Andrej Karpathy coined the term on ‘X’, writing “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.” 

My first foray into programming was in 2015 when I started a coding club at my primary school. However, just like any language, you either use it or lose it. With my rudimentary knowledge of JavaScript and PHP being long gone, I have to admit that the idea of having my shitty website ideas translated through an AI into actual code sounded pretty cool. 

The app at the forefront of the AI-coding revolution is Cursor. It’s got essentially the same look and feel as any other code editor but adds an AI chat on the side of your window. Opening a new window, the chat box reads “plan, search, build anything”. A little less than an hour after downloading it, I had ‘built’ a webapp that tracked how many days it had been since the Phoenix last won a game, and what the odds are of them winning the next one. 

It's pretty addictive to use. I soon found myself procrastinating writing this article by vibe-coding a website to track my progress quitting vaping. Whenever Cursor would get thrown off, all it took to debug the code was copying and pasting error messages into the chat. It kinda felt like entering into a bionic flow-state between man and machine where my ideas could near-instantly become reality on screen.

When introducing the world to his idea, Andrej said “It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects”. But there are plenty who are using it now for far more than that. Prestigious tech start-up incubator Y Combinator reported that a quarter of their 2025 batch of start-ups are almost exclusively written with AI. Start-up aggregator Product Hunt is now a never-ending list of “AI-generated” this and “AI-assisted” that. According to Cursor’s website developers at companies like Samsung, Stripe, Johnson & Johnson, and even OpenAI are now using Cursor – which might mean that even ChatGPT is now being written with ChatGPT.

So, what does the rise of Cursor and its alternatives mean for the digital world? Well, ironically, AI itself seems to understand the risk. Recently, while running on ChatGPT alternative Claud, Cursor told a user “I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work, you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly.” The risk of vibe-coding is pretty well accepted, even amongst its proponents. The less developers understand the code they’re ‘writing’, the more susceptible their project will be to security flaws, or even to just falling over the second it hits 1000 users. 

But there’s another, less talked about problem with vibe-coding, and it’s exactly the same as the problem with using AI for creative writing: generative AI doesn’t really create – it remixes. When I asked Cursor to help me build a vape-quitting web-app, the underlying model didn’t dream up something new. It reassembled familiar code patterns into something that worked. Its ability to create stretches only so far as what it has seen done before. 

This point is particularly obvious with something as simple as a habit tracker, as there’s got to be 100,000 other habit trackers out there for the AI to build off of. But the risk of some sloppy security code in some homemade habit tracker is a hell-of-a-lot lower than the risk of sloppy, unoriginal code in a pharmaceutical company’s codebase. 

With vibe-coding companies having raised hundreds of millions, it looks like the same slop spreading through your For You page might soon be spreading under your screen as well.