Vibe coding has been named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year, beating ‘clanker’. For most people, this emerging form of software development — which turns natural language into computer code using AI — may not mean much, but the concept is making plenty of noise within the coding community. One of the leading players in the space is Ant Group’s new ‘vibe coding’ app, LingGuang, which has surpassed one million downloads in just four days, reaching the milestone faster than OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora.
Owned by Ant Group, LingGuang took the top spot on Apple’s mainland China App Store for free utilities and ranked seventh overall for free apps. Ant Group is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding.
Vibe coding is becoming a popular way for hobbyists to build apps or websites, and professional programmers are increasingly using it at work. Several vibe-coding products are now in the market, from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Amazon.
The tools are not perfect and require someone to check the output. One company, for instance, tried Replit’s AI coding agent, which ended up deleting an entire database without permission.
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy posted on social media in February: “There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding,’ where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists… It’s possible because the large language models are getting too good.”
Ant Group’s LingGuang directly generates the app that users ask for, offering every user “their own personal AI developer”, according to the company. After the app is generated, users can use AI to customise it. Under development since March, the LingGuang project was overseen by Ant Group chief technology officer He Zhengyu, a PhD graduate from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The releases of the AI app Qwen and LingGuang come at a time when Alibaba founder Jack Ma is back in action, almost a year after he endorsed the firm’s AI-first strategy in a rare public speech.