How to vibe code in science: early adopters share their tips

Last year, climate researcher Zeke Hausfather was playing around with climate-data visualizations, trying to find new and shocking ways to show just how fast Earth is warming . He was brainstorming ideas with an artificial-intelligence tool and getting it to code and create them quickly. Together, they made innovative tree-ring-style plots with the months of the year around each ring, the annual circles growing outwards with time and the colours showing temperature. Then Hausfather asked the AI tool: what if these plots were 3D? The result was what Hausfather calls a thermal helix animation, showing temperature spiralling upwards through time into a shape reminiscent of a tornado (see ‘A new view’). In a world in which most people have seen the classic ‘hockey-stick’ graph of rising global temperatures, it is a refreshing graphic: compelling and beautiful. And, despite being a competent coder, Hausfather had no idea how to make it on his own. Hausfather, a researcher at the climate data non-profit organization Berkeley Earth in California, is not alone in using AI tools in this way. Thanks to large language models (LLMs), people can now simply ask their computers to write and implement code for graphics, applications, data processing and just about anything else they can imagine. This kind of laid-back, conversational technique is often called vibe coding. Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of US firm OpenAI , coined the term last year. …