Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want in plain language to an AI model, then steering and reviewing what it produces rather than typing most of the code yourself. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 for a way of working where you lean on the model for the writing and spend your own attention on intent, review and correction.

Is vibe coding the same as using an AI coding assistant?

Not quite, and the distinction is what most arguments about the term are actually about. Autocompleting a line with an assistant is a faster keyboard. Vibe coding describes handing over a whole task and judging the result — the shift is in who holds the detail, not in how fast the typing goes.

Is vibe coding a real job?

It is rarely a job title, and a posting that says "vibe coder" is still unusual. What exists is a growing set of engineering roles that expect fluency with these tools and say so in the requirements — agent engineering, developer tooling, internal automation, and product roles where prototyping in code is part of the work. 42 such roles are open on No Varnish right now across 9 tools.

Do you need to be able to code to vibe code?

For anything you intend to keep, yes. The failure mode of the approach is accepting code you cannot evaluate, and the roles hiring for it are explicit about this — they ask for people who review what the model produced, not people who ship it unread. The tools raise the ceiling on what one engineer can do; they do not remove the need to understand the result.

Which tools do these roles ask for?

Most commonly the coding agents and IDEs — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Codex — alongside agent frameworks and the model APIs themselves. Automation tools like n8n and Zapier appear in the internal-tooling roles. Every tool tracked here has its own page listing the open roles that name it.

Definition

What is vibe coding?

Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want in plain language to an AI model, then steering and reviewing what it produces rather than typing most of the code yourself.

Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase in early 2025. The shift it describes is in where your attention goes: away from writing each line, towards stating intent clearly and judging whether what came back is right.

Where the term is contested

Plenty of engineers dislike it, and the objection is worth stating fairly: taken literally, “vibes” suggests shipping code nobody read, which is a bad idea and not what the people doing it well are doing. Karpathy’s original description was of throwaway weekend projects, and the term has since been stretched to cover serious production work.

The useful reading is narrower than the marketing and broader than the criticism. It describes handing a whole task to a model and holding responsibility for the result — which is a genuine change in how the work feels, and not the same as autocompleting a line faster.

What do vibe coding jobs pay?

On this board the published figures currently run from $60k to $445k a year. Every one of those figures was published by the employer: a role that does not state its pay cannot be listed on this board at all. Pay tracks the underlying engineering seniority rather than the tooling — these are ordinary software salaries at companies that happen to expect AI fluency.

Worth knowing how unusual it is to be able to say that at all: we read every role on 89 AI companies’ own job boards and 57% of them state a salary. The rest tell you nothing until you have spent the conversations.

Common questions

What is vibe coding?: Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want in plain language to an AI model, then steering and reviewing what it produces rather than typing most of the code yourself. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 for a way of working where you lean on the model for the writing and spend your own attention on intent, review and correction.
Is vibe coding the same as using an AI coding assistant?: Not quite, and the distinction is what most arguments about the term are actually about. Autocompleting a line with an assistant is a faster keyboard. Vibe coding describes handing over a whole task and judging the result — the shift is in who holds the detail, not in how fast the typing goes.
Is vibe coding a real job?: It is rarely a job title, and a posting that says "vibe coder" is still unusual. What exists is a growing set of engineering roles that expect fluency with these tools and say so in the requirements — agent engineering, developer tooling, internal automation, and product roles where prototyping in code is part of the work. 42 such roles are open on No Varnish right now across 9 tools.
What do vibe coding jobs pay?: On this board the published figures currently run from $60k to $445k a year. Those are the figures the employers published, not estimates — a role that does not state its pay cannot be listed here at all. Pay tracks the underlying engineering seniority rather than the tooling: these are ordinary software salaries at companies that happen to expect AI fluency.
Do you need to be able to code to vibe code?: For anything you intend to keep, yes. The failure mode of the approach is accepting code you cannot evaluate, and the roles hiring for it are explicit about this — they ask for people who review what the model produced, not people who ship it unread. The tools raise the ceiling on what one engineer can do; they do not remove the need to understand the result.
Which tools do these roles ask for?: Most commonly the coding agents and IDEs — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Codex — alongside agent frameworks and the model APIs themselves. Automation tools like n8n and Zapier appear in the internal-tooling roles. Every tool tracked here has its own page listing the open roles that name it.

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