An Old Idea Wearing a New Costume

Every generation of software developers tends to believe its most disruptive innovation arrived from nowhere. Vibe coding, the practice of describing intent in natural language and letting an AI agent handle the execution, feels genuinely new, and in its literal mechanics it is. But the underlying philosophy driving it, prototype fast, involve the user immediately, treat requirements as something discovered through iteration rather than specified perfectly in advance, is considerably older than the transformer architecture powering today’s coding agents.