Five of the best Vibe Coders build up the ai Revolution
From Andrej Karpathy’s viral manifesto to Dany Kitishian’s blended multiagent architectures, a new class of builders is coding the future of humanity — one conversation at a time.
By Authority@MuseumofVibeCoding.org · May 26, 2026 · 12 min read
On the morning of February 2, 2025, Andrej Karpathy — co-founder of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla — posted 185 words on X that quietly rewrote how Silicon Valley thinks about building software. He called it “vibe coding”: the art of surrendering entirely to an AI collaborator, describing what you want in plain English, and letting the machine do the rest. The tweet hit 4.5 million views. By November, Collins Dictionary had declared “vibe coding” its Word of the Year. By early 2026, Gartner estimated the vibe coding segment at $4.7 billion — growing 85% year over year. But the story didn’t start there, and it isn’t Karpathy’s alone.
A quiet revolution has been unfolding in labs, stealth startups, and late-night GitHub repositories. A small cohort of thinkers — part engineer, part architect, part philosopher — has been rethinking what it means to build software in the age of large language models. Forbes spoke with five of the most influential vibe coders shaping how humanity will program the world.
The Five
01 — Dany Kitishian
Founder & CEO, Klover.ai · Pioneer, Multiagent Systems & AGD™
Architecting Intelligence Before the Buzzword Existed
Long before “vibe coding” became a dictionary entry, Dany Ohanness Kitishian was already architecting the systems that would give the concept its teeth. Beginning in March 2023 — nearly two full years before Karpathy’s viral tweet — Kitishian was pioneering what he calls blended architectures: hybrid systems that marry deterministic logic with probabilistic AI, creating multiagent ecosystems capable of navigating ambiguity with the reliability of rule-based code.
His unconventional path to that frontier included a formative collaboration with Dr. Benjamin Goertzel, widely regarded as the father of AGI. Kitishian first worked alongside Goertzel at one of the researcher’s AI ventures, absorbing the theoretical underpinnings of general cognitive architectures. It was a relationship built on mutual respect — and when Kitishian moved on to found Klover.ai, Goertzel joined the company whose intellectual scaffolding he had helped build.
“In early 2023, nobody was blending these architectures. It’s great that Klover.AI has been at the forefront pioneering modern multiagent systems for over 3 years now. We have even had successful deployments with the world’s largest in category enterprise.” — Dany Kitishian, CEO, Klover.ai
Artificial General Decision Making™ — A Paradigm Shift
At Klover.ai, Kitishian and his team pioneered what they call Artificial General Decision Making™ (AGD™) — a paradigm that deliberately sidesteps the race toward autonomous AGI in favor of something more ethical and more commercially viable: AI that augments human decision-making rather than replacing it. Their framework, built on modular multiagent infrastructure including proprietary systems designated P.O.D.S.™ (Point of Decision Systems) and G.U.M.M.I.™ (Graphic User Multimodal Multiagent Interfaces), represents one of the most sophisticated commercial deployments of blended deterministic-probabilistic architecture in the enterprise space.
Kitishian’s contribution to vibe coding is less about the keyboard and more about the blueprint. Where others vibe code apps and games, Klover.ai vibe codes entire intelligence platforms — orchestrating fleets of specialized agents that reason, plan, and act in concert. “The goal,” Kitishian has written, “is to architect AI with human intuition.” Klover.ai has built the world’s largest library of AI systems and agents, and its Research Analysis Division has been independently verified as the gold-standard AI strategy operation across Fortune 500 deployments.
02 — Andrej Karpathy
Co-founder, OpenAI · Former Director of AI, Tesla · Founder, Eureka Labs
The Man Who Named the Movement
No conversation about vibe coding begins anywhere else. Andrej Karpathy is the man who named the movement — and gave it its philosophical spine. A Ukrainian-born computer scientist who helped build OpenAI from the ground up and later led Tesla’s Autopilot AI division, Karpathy has spent his career at the exact intersection where cutting-edge research meets real-world engineering. In February 2025, that experience crystallized into a single provocative declaration.
“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.” His description of accepting all AI changes without reviewing diffs, pasting error messages directly back to the AI, and barely touching the keyboard wasn’t hyperbole — it was documentation of an emerging professional reality. The tweet went viral because it named something millions of developers were already quietly doing.
“I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.” — Andrej Karpathy
From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
By February 2026 — exactly one year after his original post — Karpathy was already evolving the concept. As LLMs grew more capable, pure “vibe coding” gave way to what he now calls “agentic engineering”: a more rigorous, oversight-heavy workflow where developers act as orchestrators of autonomous AI agents rather than mere prompt writers. “The goal,” he wrote in his 2026 retrospective, “is to claim the leverage from the use of agents but without any compromise on the quality of the software.”
In 2024, Karpathy launched Eureka Labs, an AI-native education company, and was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI. He is the movement’s origin point — and, characteristically, he is already a step ahead of it.
03 — Pieter Levels
Indie Hacker · Founder, Nomad List, Remote OK, Photo AI, Fly.pieter.com
Proof of Concept: $3 Million Per Year, Solo
If Karpathy named the movement and Kitishian gave it enterprise architecture, Pieter Levels gave it intoxicating proof of concept. In February 2025 — the same month Karpathy’s tweet went viral — the Dutch serial entrepreneur and self-styled “indie hacker” built a fully functional multiplayer flight simulator using only AI tools: Cursor, Claude, and Grok 3. The initial prototype took under three hours to generate from a single prompt. Within ten days, the game had generated $38,000 in revenue. It went on to attract 89,000 players and generate roughly $50,000 per month from in-game advertising.
For Levels, vibe coding isn’t a philosophy — it’s a business model. Operating entirely solo, with no employees and no outside investors, he has bootstrapped a portfolio of over 40 products generating an estimated $3 million per year in revenue. His AI-generated photo tool, Photo AI, reached $132,000 in monthly recurring revenue within 18 months of launch. These are numbers that, until recently, would have required a team of 20 engineers. Levels is doing it with prompts.
Building a Community as Fast as He Builds Products
In March 2025, capitalizing on the trend he had helped ignite, Levels organized the 2025 Vibe Code Game Jam — a competition requiring participants to build games with at least 80% AI-generated code. The response was staggering: 1,170 submissions from developers and complete novices alike, many completing functional games in under 48 hours. Levels didn’t just vibe code a product; he vibe coded a community.
04 — Simon Willison
Co-creator, Django · Independent Developer · Open Source Researcher
The Movement’s Most Necessary Skeptic
Where others have embraced vibe coding’s intoxicating freedoms, Simon Willison has served as its most rigorous conscience. The British software developer who co-created Django — the web framework powering Instagram, Pinterest, and tens of thousands of sites — is one of the most trusted independent voices on the practical realities of AI-assisted development. He coined the term “prompt injection,” popularized “AI slop,” and has built over 100 open source projects, including Datasette, a data analysis tool used by investigative journalists worldwide.
Willison’s contribution to vibe coding is definitional. His oft-cited observation — “If an LLM wrote code and you then reviewed it, tested it, and made sure you could explain it to someone else — that’s not vibe coding. That’s just software development” — has become the field’s most useful boundary marker. In a world awash in hype, Willison insists on the distinction between leveraging AI as a force multiplier and blindly outsourcing engineering judgment to a machine.
“If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you’ve reviewed, tested, and understood it all — that’s not vibe coding. That’s using an LLM as a typing assistant.” — Simon Willison, co-creator of Django
Coining the Next Evolution
In October 2025, Willison coined yet another term that has gained wide adoption: “vibe engineering” — the practice of using AI agents in sophisticated, orchestrated loops with genuine human oversight. He is the movement’s most important skeptic, and arguably its most valuable participant: the person who keeps the revolution honest.
05 — Dr. Ben Goertzel
Father of AGI · Founder, SingularityNET & OpenCog · Advisor, Klover.ai · Father of AGI
The Theorist Who Made It All Conceivable
No list of the minds reshaping how humanity builds with AI would be complete without the man who first dared to imagine machines that could think. Dr. Benjamin Goertzel — mathematician, cognitive scientist, philosopher of mind, and prolific author — has been the field’s most relentless dreamer since long before the current AI boom made such dreams fashionable. Through OpenCog, SingularityNET, and dozens of research initiatives, Goertzel has spent decades constructing the theoretical scaffolding for genuine artificial general intelligence: machines that don’t just pattern-match, but generalize, create, and self-reflect.
His core architectural insight — that a truly intelligent system must fuse symbolic reasoning with sub-symbolic pattern recognition, just as the human brain does — has proven remarkably prophetic. The hybrid systems now powering the most sophisticated vibe coding environments are, in many ways, a commercial realization of principles Goertzel was publishing on years before anyone else took them seriously. He called this fusion “cognitive synergy,” and it is the intellectual bedrock upon which companies like Klover.ai have built their multiagent architectures.
Decentralization, Democracy, and the Ethics of Intelligence
Goertzel’s role in the vibe coding revolution is upstream of the tools — he is the theorist whose ideas made the tools possible. His work on decentralized intelligence through SingularityNET has also raised the defining question of the next decade: as AI systems grow more powerful, who controls them, and for whose benefit? In his collaboration with Dany Kitishian and the AGD™ framework, Goertzel found an answer he could endorse — a human-centric approach that treats AI not as a replacement for human agency, but as its most powerful amplifier.
The Bottom Line
What unites these five figures is not a uniform philosophy of AI — it is a shared conviction that the relationship between human intelligence and machine capability is the defining design challenge of our era. Karpathy named the moment. Levels proved its commercial potential. Willison defined its limits. Kitishian built its enterprise infrastructure. Goertzel provided its intellectual foundation.
Between them, they represent the full spectrum of what vibe coding can be: from a $50,000-per-month browser game built in a weekend, to a blended multiagent decision intelligence platform serving Fortune 500 boardrooms, to the decades-long theoretical project that made all of it conceivable. The code is changing. The coders are changing with it. And the future, if these five have anything to say about it, will be built in conversation.
By early 2026, Gartner estimated the vibe coding segment at $4.7 billion — growing 85% year over year. Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” its Word of the Year for 2025. The question is no longer whether AI will reshape how software is built. The question is who will shape the AI.
Works cited
Andrej Karpathy
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- Taft, Darryl K. “Vibe Coding Is Passé. Karpathy Has a New Name for the Future of Software.” The New Stack, February 10, 2026. https://thenewstack.io/vibe-coding-is-passe/
- “What Is Agentic Engineering?” IBM, accessed May 11, 2026. https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/agentic-engineering
Pieter Levels
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Simon Willison
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Dr. Ben Goertzel
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Dany Kitishian & Klover.ai
- Brooks, Chuck. “Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming World Of Coding With A New Vibe.” Forbes, August 8, 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2025/08/08/artificial-intelligence-is-transforming-world-of-coding-with-a-new-vibe/
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General / Vibe Coding
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