Summer Vibes ... Autumn Code
A High School Computer Teacher’s reflection on the implications of “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,"
– Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI Cofounder)
Imagine there was a machine to which we could simply say the words “bring me a washing machine” and a perfectly functioning machine was delivered in minutes with no visible cost. How motivated would we be to inquire about its energy efficiency, its maintenance, or much less how it works?
This autumn, we’ll see a similar phenomenon in high school computer science classrooms. Some first-year students will arrive having generated elaborate apps or games, often with little grasp of the syntax or logic behind them. This vibe coding mindset will reshape how code is produced and how we teach Computer Science. In the past students have “coded above their level” by grabbing code from the internet, learning how to run it and tweaking the code to their liking. The shift to vibe coding is different from this in two ways. Vibe coders can:
Start with whatever project they can imagine, unconstrained by beginner templates.
Iterate rapidly, adding and changing features without touching a single line of code themselves.
To see vibe coding in action, you can paste a prompt like this into an AI chat session like Chat-GPT or Gemini:
“Write a simple p5.js game inspired where a spaceship moves horizontally across the bottom of the screen and has to dodge or blast asteroids coming from the top of the screen. The player should score points for blasting asteroids and lose health if they get hit. Create a runnable link.”
Whether or not you understand the code, you’ll get a playable game. Want an explanation of how to use it? Ask the AI to explain. Want to tweak a few details? Ask the AI to change it. Is it not working as you expected? Ask the AI to fix it.
As AI-powered “vibe coding” changes the way we build software. If we lean on intuition, rapid iteration, and collaboration with smart tools, Computer Science education needs to shift too. It is increasingly imperative to help students think critically, understand trade-offs, and navigate the ethical questions that come with this new way of creating. When we ask the AI to write code for us we rely on its assumptions, biases, and potentially security gaps and unintended consequences. Ethical considerations become as important as technical ones.
Our job as teachers is to turn vibe coders into Computer Scientists. To add depth without killing the excitement. It can be a letdown to move from building flashy games to printing text in a black-and-white terminal. Anticipating this, we can inspire students to reach new levels of mastery by helping them understand the how and why behind their projects.
Table: Vibe Coder → Computer Scientist
The future of coding will be AI-assisted, but thoughtful human input will always be essential. Our role as educators is to prepare students to design technologies with intention and ethics. If we hand too much of the creative process to machines, we risk producing solutions optimized for efficiency, not for human flourishing.