Scott Klipper needed help with school pickups. The dad vibe coded an app called Trot My Tot. It lets him book one-off nannies on short notice. Firefighter Joe Poynton grew tired of disorganized grocery runs. He built a list that sorts items by their location in the store. Time saved. Money not wasted on impulse buys. These stories sound small. Yet they capture a shift playing out in homes and offices across the country. Ordinary people, far from Silicon Valley engineers, now direct AI models to generate functional software. They describe problems in plain English. The machines respond with code, interfaces, and fixes. The practice has a name. Andrej Karpathy, the former OpenAI and Tesla AI leader, coined it last year when he observed coders giving in to the vibes, embracing what large language models could do, and forgetting the code even existed. ( Karpathy on X ) Business Insider reporter Juliana Kaplan set out skeptical.…