Open source, no scarcity. Everything linked. Read the primaries, not just the summary.
The People
Originators — Who shaped the concepts
Andrej Karpathy | OpenAI co-founder, former Tesla AI Director Coined "vibe coding" in February 2025, then evolved past it to "agentic engineering." The philosophical lineage starts here. Low volume, high signal on X. Follow him.
Simon Willison | Django co-creator, Datasette The most rigorous and honest voice in this space. Draws the sharpest distinction between "vibe coding" (generating code without caring about the output) and AI-assisted programming done responsibly. His golden rule: "I won't commit any code to my repository if I couldn't explain exactly what it does to somebody else." Follow everything he writes.
- Full vibe coding archive: simonwillison.net/tags/vibe-coding
- On X: @simonw
Boris Cherny | Head of Claude Code, Anthropic Built the tool. His interviews are the clearest articulation of what Claude Code is for and what it isn't. Three essential appearances:
- Lenny's Newsletter interview — "What happens after coding is solved"
- Every.to podcast + transcript — How the team at Anthropic actually uses it
- Latent Space podcast — Deep technical philosophy, Claude Code as Unix utility
Validators — CEOs who build publicly
Sebastian Siemiatkowski | CEO, Klarna Non-technical background. Uses Cursor to build product prototypes in ~20 minutes — specifically to validate ideas before involving his engineering team. His description: "obsessed." The clearest public model for what this guide teaches.
- Fortune: Klarna and Google CEOs Vibe Coding
- AI Magazine: Why Google & Klarna's CEOs Are Vibe Coding
- BusinessToday: Klarna CEO Embraces AI Vibe Coding
Sundar Pichai | CEO, Alphabet/Google Uses Replit to build personal dashboards on weekends. "It's exciting to see how casually you can do it now." AI now writes more than 30% of new code at Google. Normalizes executive building at the highest level.
- Entrepreneur: Sundar Pichai Is Vibe Coding a Website for Fun
- AI Magazine: Google CEO Why Vibe Coding Makes Software Exciting Again
Sahil Lavingia | CEO, Gumroad 41% of Gumroad's code is AI-written, targeting 80%. Runs $10M ARR with one employee. Published the most detailed CEO productivity playbook: his key finding is that your codebase architecture determines your AI velocity — not just your prompting skill.
Practitioners — Non-technical builders who document
Matt Stockton | Consultant The most detailed public account of a non-technical professional using Claude Code for daily work. Voice-to-transcript workflow, CLAUDE.md as institutional memory, the compound effect of captured context. Essential reading.
Obie Fernandez | CTO, author of The Rails Way Built a "Personal CTO Operating System" with Claude Code: meeting sync automation, hiring pipeline, engineer history tracking. Executive workflow documented in granular detail.
Critics — The necessary counterweight
Michael Truell | CEO, Cursor (valued at $29B) The most credible warning voice because he comes from inside the space: "If you close your eyes and you don't look at the code and you have AIs build things with shaky foundations as you add another floor and another floor, things start to kind of crumble." Read this as calibration, not discouragement.
Simon Willison (also in Originators)The Perils of Vibe Coding — the best single article on production risks from AI-generated code. Read before shipping anything to anyone else.
Bridge-Builders — Who translates between worlds
swyx | Founder, Latent Space newsletter + podcast / @swyx Runs the community where AI engineers, researchers, and builders converge. Organized the AI Engineer conference. Makes technical ideas legible to wider audiences.
Lenny Rachitsky | Founder, Lenny's Newsletter 900K subscribers. Interviews the builders (Cherny, Lavingia) and translates for a product/exec audience. The "How I AI" series is the most reliable executive-level AI workflow content published regularly.
Dan Shipper | Founder, Every.to Writes from inside the practice — AI tools for thinking, writing, and building. Bridges creative and technical perspectives. Every.to runs on 15 people at million-dollar revenue, largely because they use the tools they write about.
The Outlets
Read first
| Outlet | What it covers | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Simon Willison's weblog | All AI coding topics | Most honest, precise voice. Near-daily. No hype. |
| Lenny's Newsletter | Product + exec AI workflows | Interviews that don't exist anywhere else |
| Latent Space | AI engineering, builders | Where builders talk to each other |
| Every.to | AI for knowledge work | Thinking-out-loud on executive AI tools |
| Fortune AI | Executive AI narrative | Best mainstream journalism on the CEO story |
Track regularly
| Outlet | Best for |
|---|---|
| VentureBeat | Enterprise AI deployment, Claude Cowork coverage |
| AI Magazine | CEO/executive vibe coding pieces |
| IT Pro | Security risk coverage |
| Developing.dev | Developer career + AI — Boris Cherny interview lives here |
| InfoWorld | Technical AI risk research |
The Communities
| Community | Platform | Signal |
|---|---|---|
| r/ClaudeAI | High volume. See what real users struggle with. | |
| r/ClaudeCode | More specific. Practical workflows and capability discoveries. | |
| BridgeMind Discord | Discord | 70,000+ vibe coders + agentic engineers. Real-time. |
| awesome-claude-code | GitHub | Community-curated resource list. Follow and contribute. |
| Claude Code GitHub | GitHub | Issues and PRs are the most honest view of the tool's real behavior. |
Priority Reading List
Seven pieces that give you the full picture. Read in this order.
- Karpathy — The original vibe coding post (30 sec) The founding moment. One X post that created an entire cultural conversation.
- Willison — Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (10 min) The necessary distinction. Vibe coding ≠ AI-assisted programming. Understand this before anything else.
- Willison — The Perils of Vibe Coding (10 min) Honest risk picture. Read this to stay calibrated.
- Cherny — Every.to podcast transcript (20 min) How the builder thinks about the tool. What Anthropic intended Claude Code to be.
- Lavingia — Lenny's 40x productivity playbook (20 min) The CEO practitioner case. Architecture determines AI velocity. Real numbers.
- Stockton — Claude Code for Non-Technical Work (15 min) The closest thing to what this guide teaches. Daily workflow, compounding context.
- Willison — Beyond Vibe Coding (10 min) Where it goes. The maturation from vibe coding to agentic engineering.
Follow on X
Low volume, high signal — these are worth the follow specifically:
- @karpathy — Karpathy posts rarely but each post moves the conversation
- @simonw — Daily posts, rigorous quality
- @swyx — AI engineering community signal
Context
"Vibe coding" was named Word of the Year 2025 by Collins Dictionary. Andrej Karpathy coined the term in February 2025 — and by October 2025 had already moved past it to "agentic engineering." The conversation is moving fast. All sources are linked so you can read the primaries directly.
This index is updated as the landscape evolves. Last updated: February 2026.
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