Vibe Coding Ate My Homework: An evaluation of AI approaches to greenfield software engineering and programming

Abstract: Thanks to rapid developments in generative AI, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift that may change how we interact with computers forever. We have observed a growth in the use of natural language prompts to build applications and coding infrastructures without underlying knowledge of the field, and this practice has been dubbed `vibe coding.' It arguably represents what the field of programming has been building towards since the beginning, with every higher level of abstraction that is conceived. Vibe coding promises to be the endpoint for the meta of high-level programming as far as method of input is concerned: eliminating a human's use of code syntax entirely in favour of programming in their mother tongue. This paper aims to evaluate the viability of vibe coding for greenfield software engineering tasks, as well as analyse the benchmarks that have been used to measure its software engineering prowess. To this end, we have developed an evaluation suite for analysing an LLM's proficiency in carrying out simple, isolated greenfield programming tasks in Python to provide scoped insight on the matter.