Example Driven Development: An Antidote for the Age of AI-Assisted Vibe Coding

A move away from guesswork, towards clarity

In a world where large language models gladly conjure up code at the mere hint of a prompt, we’ve entered a new era: AI-assisted vibe coding. The phrase, coined by Andrej Karpathy, captures a feeling countless developers recognize; describing what you want in natural language, trusting an LLM to translate that into code, then nudging and poking until it does what you meant. It’s a liberating, exhilarating, sometimes bewildering creative process. But as the “vibes” take over, something subtle and powerful is needed if we don’t want to end up with a tangled, mysterious codebase no one understands.

I believe the answer is Example Driven Development (EDD). Here’s why this style; rooted in clarity, emergence, and real-world behavior matters more than ever.

When “Just Vibe It” Needs a Guide Rope

There’s genuine productivity in vibe coding. Describe, iterate, accept the AI’s help. Yet time and again, I’ve seen the excitement shift into uncertainty:

• Did the AI get my intent right?
• Am I still in control of what’s being built?
• What actually matters in this behavior I’m seeing?
• Three months later: Who understands this thing?