Vibe Coding was recently named Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary (Cress, 2025). The term was coined in February 2025 by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy to describe how AI can enable programmers to “forget that the code even exists” while building software (Karpathy, 2025).
This shift has significant implications for students learning to code. While AI-assisted coding may lower technical barriers and increase accessibility for students who do not identify as programmers, it also raises questions about dependency, authorship, and how coding skills are valued and assessed. These tensions are particularly acute in computational arts education, where students may need to build functional programs in order to realise creative work, without necessarily aspiring to technical mastery. Understanding how vibe coding shapes student confidence, agency, and inclusion therefore represents a social justice issue within this academic context.
This study will explore these questions through interviews with students at different stages of the BA Fine Art: Computational Arts programme, enabling comparative insights into how prior experience, confidence, and progression shape perceptions of AI-assisted coding. By focusing on student accounts, the research aims to foreground lived experience rather than abstract debates about technology.
As Course Leader, my role is to introduce coding alongside other technical skills in ways that are accessible, inclusive, and sustainable. AI-assisted coding is already in use on the course, with a marked increase in uptake during 2025–26. This project responds directly to that change, seeking to inform pedagogical decision-making while remaining attentive to equity and inclusion.
While debates around AI-generated code are beginning to emerge in higher education (Meske et al., 2025; Maes, 2025; Ray, 2025; Sarkar and Dross, 2025), there remains limited research focused on student experience and inclusive practice within creative coding contexts (Geng et al., 2025). This study addresses that gap.
References
Cress, L. (2025). ‘Vibe coding’ named word of the year by Collins Dictionary. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpd2y053nleo.
Geng, F., Shah, A., Li, H., Mulla, N., Swanson, S., Raj, G.S., Zingaro, D. and Porter, L. (2025). Exploring Student-AI Interactions in Vibe Coding. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.22614.
Kaparthy, A. (2025) There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”… 2 February. Available at: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 [Accessed: 1 Dec 2025]
Meske, C., Hermanns, T., von der Weiden, E., Loser, K.U. and Berger, T. (2025). Vibe coding as a reconfiguration of intent mediation in software development: Definition, implications, and research agenda. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.21928.
Maes, S.H. (2025). The gotchas of ai coding and vibe coding. it’s all about support and maintenance [online]
Ray, P.P. (2025). A Review on Vibe Coding: Fundamentals, State-of-the-art, Challenges and Future Directions. Authorea Preprints.
Sarkar, A. and Drosos, I. (2025). Vibe coding: programming through conversation with artificial intelligence. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.23253.