Newswise — It started with a social media post from Andrej Karpathy, one of the founders of OpenAI. Last year, he tweeted, “There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding,’ where you fully give into the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” Karpathy said that large language models and voice-to-text programs had gotten so sophisticated that he could just ask a model to create something and then copy and paste the code it generated to build a project or create a web app from scratch. “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.”
That groovy technique might be good for patching a glitchy website or building a phone app, but can it really change the way we do science? Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are testing vibe coding tools and techniques to see how they stand up to data-intensive scientific challenges. At a recent hackathon, researchers from across the lab gathered to learn together and test commercially available coding tools like Cursor and Warp against scientific challenges as large and hairy as the hunt for dark matter and as pressing as the optimization of nuclear power plants.
As a long-time leader in computational science and the home of Aurora, one of the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputers, Argonne is no stranger to grand challenges. But to solve huge problems and to process more data than ever before, researchers are working to stay at the bleeding edge of harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) for science.
Rick Stevens sees vibe coding as another way Argonne researchers can continue to speed up scientific innovation. Stevens is the associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at Argonne. He has said that scientists need to be able to work as fast as they can think. He gets frustrated by the bottlenecks of current technology. But vibe coding is a productivity hack. “You’re unhobbled from your coding speed,” said Stevens.
With vibe coding, researchers can interact with large language models in real time, asking them questions by talking rather than by typing commands, and then getting usable output in seconds or minutes. Stevens compared it to having an AI co-scientist — or even a team of co-scientists — working alongside you. He challenged fellow scientists to work with the technology every day. “You need to get your head around how to be productive in this environment,” he said. “Think, play and have a blast!”
Breaking barriers between ideas and action
Part of the excitement around vibe coding is that we don’t know how it’s going to change science. At the hackathon, the vibe in the room was playful. The group was a mix of coders and non-coders from a variety of disciplines. Instead of quietly pecking away at their keyboards, researchers were laughing, bouncing ideas off each other and confidently speaking commands to their laptops.
The promise of AI and vibe coding isn’t just about doing science faster, Stevens explained. These tools free up scientists to be more creative, to put their energy toward things that only a human can do. “With these tools, you’re not bottlenecked by writing code,” he said. “Now, you’re focused on ideas.”
Here are some of the ideas Argonne scientists are vibing on:
1. Prototyping software to strengthen nuclear power plants
Nuclear power plants are an integral part of America’s energy supply and a reliable source of power for the growing energy needs of AI. Nuclear engineer Yeni Li and her team are creating AI models of those power plants to help plant engineers and managers predict the best times for maintenance. That knowledge can lead to more reliable and affordable energy production.
Li said that vibe coding will be useful for setting up the software architecture she needs to turn her ideas into prototypes. “These tools will help us do a few days of work in a single afternoon,” said Li.
2. Automating workflows in bioscience
Rosemarie Wilton doesn’t do a lot of coding in her work as a molecular biologist, but she does spend a significant amount of time using software tools for data analysis. Developing Python-coded pipelines would allow her to automate her data processing workflows and integrate multiple tools seamlessly. She was delighted to see how fast vibe coding could give her the command codes she needed. “For a coding novice, it’s really quite amazing. It will be a time saver,” she said.
That quick win in generating command codes led Wilton and Computational Biologist Nick Chia to think about other ways vibe coding could help. Chia mused, “If we have an AI agent generating hypotheses for experiments, could we create another AI agent to order the chemicals or samples needed to run those experiments?” Speeding up routine processes like these could help Wilton and her team track the spread of human pathogens with greater accuracy or engineer new enzymes and biosynthetic pathways faster than ever before.
3. Translating coding languages in science infrastructure
Zachary Sherman is a software developer who manages open-source Python tools for the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement group. He came to the hackathon looking for ways to quickly translate other coding languages into Python, a task that could take years of tedious manual coding.
“There are many different atmospheric tools in different coding languages and also databases with application programming interfaces for downloading and interacting with atmospheric datasets,” said Sherman. “Some of these tools are outdated. We think vibe coding can help us create tools in Python to interact with these interfaces to download and work with the datasets. We also think vibe coding will help us modernize these code bases so we can troubleshoot issues faster and save time and money as we maintain essential scientific infrastructure.”
4. Understanding the nature of the universe
Chiara Bissolotti is a nuclear physicist trying to understand how all known particles interact. Tim Hobbs is a theoretical particle physicist trying to identify unknown particles that can help us understand the nature of dark matter or other possible “new physics” in the universe. Both of their fields generate huge amounts of data from theoretical computer simulations, cosmological observations and experiments at research institutions such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and the planned Electron-Ion Collider at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. The information hidden where their data sets overlap could be the key to answering some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, from quarks to the cosmos. But merging those data sets is a monumental task if you’re coding and comparing them by hand.
“Can the data sets talk to each other?” asked Hobbs. “Might they be hiding common patterns, or guide us toward novel theoretical predictions or the automation of burdensome calculations?”
Bissolotti summed it up, “We have many, many ideas. Many more ideas than time. If vibe coding can help us build the scaffolding of the code or help us make the data comparisons more scalable and efficient, we can cut our time to solution by a huge factor.”
5. Collaborating on complex problems in national security
Jonathan Ozik is a computational scientist who uses supercomputers and simulations to understand large and complex systems across many scientific domains, such as biological systems, health care interventions and infectious diseases in urban settings. He said vibe coding can help him explain his work to the many collaborators from different backgrounds that he works with. He also sees it as a way that he can help himself switch between complex projects. “It could give me a two-minute reintroduction to the code and the context I’m working in,” he said. “There’s no reason not to try to make your daily tasks easier.”
Ozik predicts vibe coding will open research up to ideas we can’t yet begin to imagine: “If you have fewer perceived barriers, you create new possibilities. Things that were previously infeasible in science will become common.”
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.
