What Is Vibe Creating?

On February 2, 2025, Andrej Karpathy tweeted a phrase that changed how developers talk about their work. "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding,'" he wrote, "where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." Within weeks, the term was everywhere. Cursor launched marketing around it. Y Combinator portfolio companies started using it in pitch decks. The mainstream tech press picked it up and ran.

Two days later, on February 4, 2025, we published the extension of that idea. Not just for software. For everything.

We called it Vibe Creating.

The argument was simple: Karpathy hadn't discovered something about coding. He'd discovered something about creative work in the age of capable AI. The pattern — describe what you want in natural language, let AI execute, iterate on taste rather than on syntax — wasn't native to software. It was native to the creative process itself. Vibe coding was one instance of something much larger.

The Definition

Vibe Creating is the discipline of directing AI across any creative domain using intent, taste, and natural language — where the human retains full creative authorship and the AI operates as execution layer.

The formula is clean: vibe + [discipline] = a new practice. Vibe coding is Vibe Creating applied to software. Vibe filmmaking is Vibe Creating applied to cinema. Vibe composing is Vibe Creating applied to music. Vibe designing, vibe advertising, vibe writing, vibe founding — each is a discipline-specific instance of the same underlying pattern.

What makes it "vibe"? The word carries meaning. A vibe is not an instruction set. It is not a specification document. It is an orientation — a felt sense of where you're going, communicated through references, mood, intent, and examples. When a director gives notes to a cinematographer, they're vibing. When a creative director marks up a layout, they're vibing. The difference now is that the entity receiving the vibe is an AI — and AI, for the first time in history, can actually act on it at production quality.

Where It Came From

The name is deliberate. Karpathy's phrasing was precise: "give in to the vibes." That captured something real — the way working with a capable AI model feels qualitatively different from instructing a script or configuring a tool. You're in conversation. You're feeling your way toward a result. You're iterating on feel as much as function.

But the scope of "vibe coding" was too narrow. Developers weren't the only ones experiencing this shift. Musicians using Suno and Udio were experiencing it. Filmmakers using Runway and Kling were experiencing it. Advertisers using AI to generate concept decks at agency speed were experiencing it. Designers using v0 and Claude to turn a napkin sketch into a working interface were experiencing it.

They all needed a word for what was happening to them. Vibe Creating is that word.

"The technical barrier dissolved. The taste barrier didn't. That's the entire shift."

— IMAJIM, February 2025

The 18 Disciplines

Our current mapping of the Vibe Creating landscape covers eighteen disciplines — each one a domain where the AI-execution pattern has either fully arrived or is emerging fast:

• Vibe Coding — Software, apps, tools (Cursor, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot)
• Vibe Designing — UI, visual systems, brand (v0, Claude Design, Midjourney)
• Vibe Filmmaking — Narrative cinema, short-form video (Runway Gen-3, Kling, Sora)
• Vibe Composing — Music, soundscapes, scores (Suno, Udio, MusicLM)
• Vibe Writing — Long-form, copy, narrative (Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini)
• Vibe Advertising — Campaign concepting, creative strategy (AI ideation + production)
• Vibe Founding — Company building with AI at every layer of operations
• Vibe Marketing — Growth, content strategy, channel execution
• Vibe Architecture — Spatial design, generative building forms
• Vibe Photography — Generative imagery, style direction, post-production
• Vibe Animation — Motion graphics, character animation, kinetic storytelling
• Vibe Styling — Fashion direction, editorial curation, AI lookbooks
• Vibe Publishing — Editorial systems, book creation, content pipelines
• Vibe Teaching — Course design, AI-generated curriculum, adaptive learning
• Vibe Research — Deep synthesis, literature review, intelligence gathering
• Vibe Performing — Concert visuals, live show direction, immersive experience
• Vibe Curating — Collection building, editorial taste, algorithmic gallery
• Vibe Strategizing — Business intelligence, competitive mapping, scenario planning

This list is not exhaustive — it's expanding. Each discipline follows the same logic: a human with taste and vision directs, an AI with capability executes. The human's job is not to understand how the AI works. The human's job is to know what good looks like.

Why "Vibe Creating" and Not Just "AI Creativity"

The phrase "AI creativity" is vague in a way that's actually harmful. It implies the AI is the creative agent. It raises questions about authorship, originality, and what exactly the human is contributing. It positions the human as passenger, not pilot.

Vibe Creating is different. The word "creating" positions the human as the primary agent. The word "vibe" specifies the mode of direction: not technical command, but aesthetic intent. The AI is a medium, not a mind.

This matters for how you think about the role. A Vibe Creator is not someone who types prompts and hopes for the best. A Vibe Creator is someone who knows what they want — who has developed taste, has built a body of references, understands how to communicate aesthetic intent with precision — and uses AI to close the gap between vision and output.

The distinction also matters legally and professionally. The authorship question is settled when you frame it correctly: the human directs, the AI executes. A film director doesn't operate the camera but owns the film. A composer doesn't build the instrument but owns the composition. Vibe Creating names the same logic for the AI era.

What a Vibe Creator Actually Does

The worst misconception about Vibe Creating is that it's easy. That anyone with access to the right tools is automatically a Vibe Creator. This is like saying that anyone with a camera is automatically a filmmaker. Access is the floor, not the ceiling.

What separates a Vibe Creator from someone who uses AI tools is the Quiver.

The Quiver is the operational repertoire of curated references that a creator maintains over time — a living library of examples, influences, and precedents organized by mood, discipline, and intent. Tarantino has watched over 10,000 films and can draw on that archive in real-time. Wes Anderson has a palette of color references so precise that his films are instantly recognizable. Beyoncé builds visual reference reels before recording a single note.

These aren't decoration. They are the precision instruments of creative direction. A Vibe Creator's Quiver is what allows them to point at what they want instead of struggling to describe it from scratch. "Like the opening of Children of Men but with the texture of an early Lubezki." That sentence contains a decade of cinematic knowledge compressed into a single directorial instruction. A Vibe Creator builds the capacity to speak that language fluently.

The tools — Runway, Suno, Midjourney, Claude, Cursor — are the same for everyone. The Quiver isn't.

The Quiver in Practice

Building a Quiver is deliberate work. It doesn't accumulate automatically through passive consumption. It requires the habit of noticing — pulling a film still because the shadow work is singular, saving a color palette because it evokes a specific decade, bookmarking a piece of music because the texture of it matches a feeling you haven't named yet.

A well-developed Quiver has three properties: it is curated (not everything, the right things), it is organized by function (searchable by mood, not just by medium), and it is alive (constantly updated as taste evolves).

The relationship between the Quiver and AI tools is straightforward: you see something in your Quiver, you point, and you execute. The AI closes the technical gap between the reference and the output. What used to require years of technical training — to animate like Miyazaki, to shoot like Roger Deakins, to write like Joan Didion — can now be approximated in an afternoon by someone with a strong enough directorial vision and a rich enough Quiver to point from.

"Taste is the scarce resource. Technical skill is the commodity. That inversion is what Vibe Creating is built on."

— IMAJIM

Why Now

This framework didn't become possible because AI got creative. It became possible because AI got competent. There's a crucial difference. Midjourney Version 1 was interesting. Version 6 is production-ready. Runway Gen-1 was a research demo. Gen-3 Alpha is what working directors are using for real shots. Suno v3 was impressive. Suno v4 is what musicians are releasing commercially.

The quality threshold crossed in 2024 and 2025 for discipline after discipline. And when execution quality is no longer the bottleneck, the bottleneck shifts to where it always should have been: vision. Direction. Taste. The human side of the equation.

Every creative discipline is going through its own version of this transition at its own pace. Some are ahead — coding, design, writing. Some are six months behind — film, music, advertising. None will be exempt. The question for every creative professional alive today is not whether AI will touch their discipline. It's whether they'll be the one directing it when it does.

The Community Forming Around It

The Vibe Creating framework doesn't exist in isolation. vibecreators.world is the directory tracking the practitioners — the people actually doing Vibe Creating across all eighteen disciplines. It currently maps over 370 creators, from solo artists using AI to make commercial-quality music to directors building feature films without a crew.

What emerges from looking at that community as a whole is a new creative archetype: highly taste-developed, tool-agnostic, discipline-crossing, and singularly obsessed with output quality. Not engineers who got interested in art. Not artists who got interested in technology. Something new.

The Vibe Creator is the creative professional native to this moment. The person who doesn't ask "should I use AI in my work?" because the question has already been answered. The person whose entire practice is built on the assumption that intent is primary, execution is delegable, and taste is the only thing that scales.

That's the framework. That's the claim. That's what the book documents.

— IMAJIM