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Vibe coding is the new game jam ​

By Oleg Sidorkin, CTO of Cinevva

Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" in February 2025 to describe building software by describing what you want and letting AI handle the implementation. A year later, Collins Dictionary made it their Word of the Year. Searches for the term jumped 6,700% that spring.

For most software, vibe coding means faster prototyping. For game development, it means something more specific. The barrier between "weird idea" and "playable prototype" collapsed.

A Breaker Belt: Snake meets Arkanoid, vibe coded in three days on the Cinevva Engine

What actually changed ​

Game jams exist because game development takes too long for most experiments. You get 48 hours, a theme, and whatever energy you can sustain on caffeine and adrenaline. The constraint forces creativity. You can't build anything ambitious, so you build something weird. Some of the best games in history started as jam projects.

Vibe coding does something similar but removes the artificial time pressure. When describing a mechanic, a mood, or a behavior gets you a working prototype in minutes instead of days, you can try ideas that nobody would greenlight. The economics of experimentation changed.

We built A Breaker Belt in three days. Two people, on and off, not crunching. Snake meets Arkanoid. 50 waves. 23 brick types. Reactive music. AI narration. Real-time synthesized sound effects. Shipped to web, mobile, and PC. That scope would normally take a team of eight or nine people several months. The weird mashup that would die in a brainstorm doc instead got built over a long weekend.

That's what vibe coding actually does for games. It doesn't make great games automatic. It makes experiments cheap.

The numbers behind the trend ​

The investment tells you how seriously the industry is taking this. Cursor raised $2.3 billion in Series D. Lovable raised $330 million at a $6.6 billion valuation. An estimated 25% of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 startups ran on codebases that are 95% AI-generated.

In game development specifically, Three.js is now the primary library for vibe-coded web games, with 2.7 million weekly npm downloads. Platforms like Cinevva, Phaser, and a growing list of AI tools are building development environments where describing intent is the primary input.

Karpathy himself has already moved on to the next concept. He's calling it "agentic engineering," where AI agents write code themselves rather than responding to human prompts. "There is an art and science and expertise to it," he wrote. The field is moving faster than the vocabulary.

What doesn't change ​

The limits are real and worth being honest about. As projects grow, context management becomes the bottleneck. AI model performance degrades when your project gets complex enough that the full context doesn't fit in a single window. The code you get is often good enough to run but not good enough to maintain. When something breaks, debugging AI-generated complexity that nobody fully understands is its own special challenge.

There's also the taste problem. AI can generate a mechanically functional game very quickly. It can't tell you whether the game is fun. Whether the difficulty curve feels right. Whether the music matches the mood. Whether the pacing keeps you engaged or slowly bores you. That layer of judgment, the thing that separates a prototype from a game worth playing, still requires a human who cares about the result.

Game jams work because the time pressure forces you to make hard choices about what matters. Vibe coding removes the time pressure but not the need for choices. The best vibe-coded games will come from people who know what they want, not from people who accept whatever comes back.

What I think happens next ​

More games that shouldn't exist will exist. Some of them will be terrible. Some of them will be brilliant. The ratio might not change, but the volume will. And in that volume, you'll find games that could never have been made before. Genres that don't have names yet. Mashups nobody would have funded. Personal projects that one person built because the tools finally got out of the way.

That's always been the promise of better tools. Not that everything gets better, but that more things get to exist. The game jam energy, the "let's just try this and see," is no longer confined to a 48-hour window. It's Tuesday afternoon and you have an idea. By Thursday, it's playable.

Cinevva's engine is free to use. Your weird game idea might be three days away from existing.

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