What is vibe coding and AI-assisted development

Though there are various definitions of vibe coding, at its essence, vibe coding and AI-assisted development use AI to turn a natural language description of the outcome you want into applications using prompts. Autonomous app development is vibe coding on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

• Vibe coding involves describing a problem that you have or an application that you want in natural language, and having AI generate it for you.
• AI-assisted development uses AI tools that work alongside developers to suggest code, auto-complete functions, and explain existing code.

Figure 1. AI-assisted development and vibe coding

The term "vibe coding" can be anything between two distinct philosophies:

• One definition of vibe coding state that developers don't review or touch generated code before checking it in; simply provide an idea, get code back, no review needed.
• Another definition of vibe coding is an umbrella term that encompasses AI-assisted, agentic-assisted development, where developers still need to understand and support the generated code.

ServiceNow has tools to help you review, refine, and test apps for both vibe coding, like Build Agent, and AI-assisted development, such as Now Assist for Creator.

Though testing and deployment generally fall outside the scope of vibe coding, they are covered in this document to account for all phases of development. Governance is also included in apps that are vibe coded on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

Most definitions of vibe coding don't include looking at or adjusting code after it is generated, for example in ServiceNow Studio or ServiceNow IDE. However, this document includes information on those processes for people who want to take their vibe coded product to the next level.

Regardless of how you define vibe coding, it enables users across skill levels to build apps by prompting, accelerating the app creation cycle.