I have been using 'aider' as my go to coding tool for over a year. It basically works the same way that it always has: you specify all the context and give it a request and that goes to the model without much massaging.
I can see a massive improvement in results with each new model that arrives. I can do so much more with Gemini 2.5 or Claude 4 than I could do with earlier models and the tool has not really changed at all.
I will agree that for the casual user, the tools make a big difference. But if you took the tool of today and paired it with a model from last year, it would go in circles
You can write projects with LLMs thanks to tools that can analyze your local project's context, which didn't exist a year ago.
You could use Cursor, Windsurf, Q CLI, Claude Code, whatever else with Claude 3 or even an older model and you'd still get usable results.
It's not the models which have enabled "vibe coding", it's the tools.
An additional proof of that is that the new models focus more and more on coding in their releases, and other fields have not benefited at all from the supposed model improvements. That wouldn't be the case if improvements were really due to the models and not the tooling.
You need a certain quality of model to make 'vibe coding' work. For example, I think even with the best tooling in the world, you'd be hard pressed to make GPT 2 useful for vibe coding.
I'm not claiming otherwise. I'm just saying that people say "look what we can do with the new models" when they're completely ignoring the fact that the tooling has improved a hundred fold (or rather, there was no tooling at all and now there is).
Clearly nobody is talking about GPT-2 here, but I posit that you would have a perfectly reasonable "vibe coding" experience with models like the initial ChatGPT one, provided you have all the tools we have today.
They're using a specific model for that, and since they can't access private GitHub repos like MS, they rely on code shared by devs, which keeps growing every month.
I have been using 'aider' as my go to coding tool for over a year. It basically works the same way that it always has: you specify all the context and give it a request and that goes to the model without much massaging.
I can see a massive improvement in results with each new model that arrives. I can do so much more with Gemini 2.5 or Claude 4 than I could do with earlier models and the tool has not really changed at all.
I will agree that for the casual user, the tools make a big difference. But if you took the tool of today and paired it with a model from last year, it would go in circles