Vibe Coding as a Reconfiguration of Intent Mediation in Software Development: Definition, Implications, and Research Agenda
This addresses the need for conceptual clarity in software development as AI-generated code becomes widespread, offering a foundational analysis with implications for developers and organizations.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding the emerging paradigm of vibe coding, where humans and generative AI co-create software through natural language dialogue, and finds that it reconfigures cognitive work by redistributing epistemic labor and shifting expertise toward collaborative orchestration.
Software development is undergoing a fundamental transformation as vibe coding becomes widespread, with large portions of contemporary codebases now being AI-generated. The disconnect between rapid adoption and limited conceptual understanding highlights the need for an inquiry into this emerging paradigm. Drawing on an intent perspective and historical analysis, we define vibe coding as a software development paradigm where humans and generative AI engage in collaborative flow to co-create software artifacts through natural language dialogue, shifting the mediation of developer intent from deterministic instruction to probabilistic inference. By intent mediation, we refer to the fundamental process through which developers translate their conceptual goals into representations that computational systems can execute. Our results show that vibe coding reconfigures cognitive work by redistributing epistemic labor between humans and machines, shifting the expertise in the software development process away from traditional areas such as design or technical implementation toward collaborative orchestration. We identify key opportunities, including democratization, acceleration, and systemic leverage, alongside risks, such as black box codebases, responsibility gaps, and ecosystem bias. We conclude with a research agenda spanning human-, technology-, and organization-centered directions to guide future investigations of this paradigm.