In February of 2025, the legendary Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding”, and the term continues to reverberate throughout the ecosystem today:
Source: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 Karpathy has an uncommon ability to tune into the zeitgeist, pull out the specific aspects of what everyone is feeling but can’t quite articulate yet, and drive the discourse around those feelings.
In a telling bookmark to the year of 2025 and everything around AI and coding that happened within that year, he also captured the sense of acceleration and overwhelming disorientation that many were feeling.
It’s notable to me that the original “vibe coding” post has 6.8 million views, but the post where he admits “I've never felt this much behind as a programmer” has more than double that, with 16.8 million views:
Source: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2004607146781278521 Given that he was the one who coined and popularized the term “vibe coding”, you may think that Karpathy is, in my view, the “prophet of vibe coding” mentioned in the title. But that’s not actually the case.
In my view, the “prophet of vibe coding” is none other than Steve Yegge, the longtime developer at Amazon and Google and, more recently, the creator and purveyor of Gas Town. He may not have coined the term “vibe coding”, but he literally (along with coauthor Gene Kim) wrote the book on it.
Why do I argue that Yegge is the prophet of vibe coding if he didn’t even come up with the term? Because from my vantage point, no one has more accurately predicted what the rise of AI will do to the profession of software development, often months before the trend becomes clear, than Yegge.
I’m not sure when Yegge first crossed my radar, but it was probably when his Death of the Junior Developer blog post hit Hacker News. I remember thinking it had some interesting points, but then I moved on and didn’t give it more thought.
His follow-up post, Revenge of the Junior Developer, happened to hit Hacker News when I was on vacation in early 2025, and I had the time to read it closely and to go back and reread the Death of the Junior Developer post. It was fascinating watching someone knowledgeable trying to make sense of the rapidly evolving state of the art, and the implications of where things seemed to be going.
At the time (early 2025), we were just starting to get glimpses of what comes next, after the underwhelming experience of basic Copilot autocompletions. I believe Claude Code was first released right around that time. This was way before the release of Opus 4.5 and the agentic explosion of Nov/Dev 2025. It feels like a lifetime ago now. But it’s clear that Yegge was already seeing where things were heading, and already wrestling with the implications, both for experienced developers and for junior developers.
Looking back on these two blog posts now, it seems clear that Death of the Junior Developer reflects someone trying to make sense of the major changes they see coming, but still in the “fog of war” of being early on the curve and not having much clarity yet. Revenge of the Junior Developer is where the clarity starts to arrive. Yegge was starting to describe some of the structure of what was happening within the developer ecosystem. This visual captures it nicely:
Source: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/revenge-of-the-junior-developer Remember, Claude Code was only released in late-Feb 2025, about a month before Revenge of the Junior Developer was published. I was aware of Claude Code when I first read the post, but it was still so new at the time that it hadn’t really sunk in. But Yegge could see the progression that was likely to come - a developer first working with one coding agent, then multiple agents, then “fleets” of agents.
The “agent fleets” was an evocative image for me, and it stuck with me. As developers, were we really going to be “admirals” of our own “agent fleets”, with layered hierarchies of agents all working on our behalf? Would we really have that much leverage? How would we manage it all? I could imagine it in my head, but it still felt more like science fiction than a possible reality at the time.
And just as important as the mental imagery, Yegge foreshadowed the challenges and debates that would unfold over the next year. The pushback from senior developers claiming anything related to vibe coding is not “real coding”. Management pushing AI usage from the top down, likely without understanding what they actually wanted. The implications for software development jobs. All of these debates have played out many times over the past year-plus since Yegge published Revenge of the Junior Developer, and I felt more mentally prepared to process the debates because I read this picture of the future at such an early stage.
Once I fully digested these two posts, Yegge had become an important, must-read voice to follow in order to understand what is happening. Not that he’s always right and his word is to be taken as gospel. But I’m always looking for high-signal sources of information that can help improve my mental model of the world, and Yegge clearly fit that bill. And he could be an entertaining and colorful writer as well.
When the Brute Squad post dropped a few months later, I sat down to read it with excitement. And it was another case where it took some time for the material to process and settle in my mind, but once again, it was helpful guidance for understanding the new world of software development. And it foreshadowed some debates and developments that are still unfolding now. Death of the IDE. “AI psychosis” and this need to keep feeding the agents with stuff to do. And what it all means for jobs and the future of software development.
And then came Gas Town. At some point later on in 2025, Yegge left Sourcegraph to do his own thing, and the result was the Gas Town project, alternatively described by Yegge as his take on what comes next after the IDE or “what happens when you let Claude Code run Claude Code.”
Gas Town was… controversial, to say the least. The terminology the project used didn’t help - rigs, polecats, the Mayor, the Deacon, etc. I remember comments like “it’s so sad seeing someone prominent go through AI psychosis in public.” I picked up a hint of manic vibes in his Latent Space interview, but that could also just be how the mind of an opinionated, ADHD-adjacent developer works. I’m not a psychiatrist so I’ll leave the arm-chair psychiatry there. But Yegge was self-aware enough to describe and give a name to the AI psychosis-like behavior so many people were going through around that time - the AI vampire. I’ve heard that term used elsewhere, including by Marc Andreessen in a recent podcast, so it seems to have gotten some traction.
But my biggest take-away from the Gas Town phenomenon was actually the mental model of “the 8 stages of programmer evolution to AI”:
Source: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04 This was a genuinely helpful mental model, to me at least. And I’ve seen a handful of subsequent posts from others presenting the 8-stage framework as their own, without credit to Yegge, so it seems to have resonated. It’s now part of the AI content mill on X.
I still think it’s relevant today for understanding developers’ evolution toward AI usage, because we all have to go through the progression in some form. First you don’t use AI at all, then you use basic autocomplete, then you have an agent open alongside the code in your IDE, then you graduate to a terminal-based coding agent, then multiple agents, then finally a full-blown agent orchestrator. And apparently there are now even more levels, but many of us are still somewhere in the original progression. But if you put any stock in what Yegge describes, we seem to be well on our way to his initial vision of agent fleets.
Just recently, I saw Tim Davis from Modular post about agent fleets, so clearly the idea is still out there rattling around the ecosystem.
Are we really going to be admirals of our own agent fleets, generals of our own agent divisions? I don’t know where the future of software development is heading in the new world of AI and coding agents, but I’m glad Yegge is out there posting his ideas and sharing his visions of what is to come.
When the Prophet of Vibe Coding speaks, a wise developer listens.