Vibe Coding: Practice, Performance, Productivity, and Risk -A State-of-the-Art Review

Abstract

Vibe coding - AI-assisted software development in which the developer describes intent in natural language and validates results by running rather than reading the generated code - was named by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 and produced its first body of empirical evidence within seventeen months. This state-of-the-art review assembles that evidence across a cross-disciplinary corpus spanning software engineering, human-computer interaction, labour economics, security research, governance, and education. We survey the model landscape, the tool ecosystem, and the performance record by task type, finding the early benchmarks saturated but task-level capability uneven: reliable code generation alongside weak fault detection and hard-to-audit documentation. The productivity record is at first contradictory: peer-reviewed field experiments report +26% more tasks per week, independent randomised trials measure a 19% slowdown, and team-level telemetry shows code-review time up +441%. We argue these readings are consistent once measurement method, scope, and time horizon are held constant, and identify six patterns behind the dispersion, among them effect-shrinkage under broader measurement, self-report diverging from independent measurement, output volume conflated with productivity, and bold claims walked back once tested over longer horizons. We further document security failures in deployed applications, code-quality degradation visible in large-scale code and developer telemetry, unsettled copyright exposure, and evidence of skill atrophy. The review closes with the open research questions and one falsifiable conjecture: that the gains are real on new code and shrink or reverse on mature codebases, which would account for most of the disagreement in the record.