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Replit CEO: "Don't Vibe Code, Just Vibe" — Pushing Back Against Karpathy's AI Coding Framework

End Of Miles

20 Apr 2025 — 2 min read

Replit CEO Amjad Masad believes the popular "vibe coding" concept championed by AI thought leaders like Andrej Karpathy misses a fundamental truth about non-programmers — they don't start with code at all but with ideas.

This perspective, shared during a recent Sequoia Capital podcast interview, reveals a significant philosophical divide in how AI-assisted programming should evolve, writes End of Miles.

The Philosophical Divide

"I don't really like this term," Masad said when asked about vibe coding. "It makes sense if you're starting from a position of coder and you're Andre Karpathy and you don't want to worry too much about the code and you keep hitting enter... but if you're starting with Replit, you're actually not starting from a position of code."

"You're starting from an idea that you're iterating on, and then you go in and the agent is unfolding this code in front of you. When you're using Replit Agent you don't have the luxury to look at the code." Amjad Masad, Replit CEO

Masad's company, which now claims 40 million users across every country globally (with China being the exception), has created a development platform that allows users without traditional programming experience to create software through its AI agent technology.

A Different Mental Model

Where Karpathy's "vibe coding" framework emphasizes programmers working alongside AI to generate code through iterative prompting, Masad envisions a fundamentally different relationship between humans and AI in software creation.

"If I were to explain Replit, it's just vibe. Don't code vibe. Not vibe coding, just vibe." Amjad Masad

This distinction isn't merely semantic. It represents divergent visions for how the expected billion new developers might interact with technology to solve problems. While Karpathy's framework centers on helping existing developers augment their workflow, Masad's approach envisions AI completely abstracting away code for people who would never identify as developers in the traditional sense.

Why This Perspective Matters

Masad's position reflects his company's broader mission to create a billion developers — a goal that necessitates reaching far beyond the existing developer community. For Replit, success depends on making software creation accessible to people who don't think of themselves as coders at all.

The "just vibe" approach allows users to focus exclusively on the problems they want to solve rather than the mechanisms of solving them. This mirrors how Replit's latest AI agent works — where users describe what they want to build, and the agent both writes the code and handles deployment without requiring the user to understand what's happening behind the scenes.

"We have assistant for more advanced people where it's like request-response and you can review the code and do all of that. But if I were to explain Replit, it's just vibe." Amjad Masad

For Masad, this distinction supports his vision of a world where knowledge workers across industries can create software without needing to understand coding practices or identify as developers in the traditional sense — a sharp departure from incremental approaches that still center code in the user experience.

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