How "vibe coding" can improve the accessibility and transparency of ecological research

The extent to which large language models (LLMs) and other artificial intelligence (AI) will augment or overtake existing scientific workflows is not clear. Opinions within the scientific community remain mixed. The rapid advance of LLM capability in coding, including the recent development of frameworks for deploying autonomous agents with enormous context windows (> 100,000 tokens), has revolutionized software engineering and web design. “Vibe coding” is a term recently coined by AI researcher, Andrej Karpathy, to describe an emerging paradigm of AI-assisted software development in which the user spends more time prompting an LLM to produce code rather than writing the code themselves. In the most extreme sense, the user does not even review the code produced and just accepts changes made as-is. However, in scientific research, where the context required to make sensible decisions include existing literature, personal experience, dialogue with other researchers, and statistical knowledge, vibe coding can quickly lead to erroneous results and other disasters. Here, we demonstrate how ecology as a field can benefit from the emerging age of “vibe coding” without the risk of compromising the scientific integrity of our research. We show how LLMs can be used to improve the accessibility, communication, and transparency of results through building of interactive dashboards to visualize results of different studies. By vibe coding such tools, ecologists (and scientists in general) obtain a newfound capacity to improve communication of their results not just to fellow researchers but also to the public. Previously, building such tools, especially for those not familiar with web design or software development (Javascript, HTML, Python), may have taken weeks of time. Usually, this did not make much sense from a cost-benefit perspective. In ecology, communication of results with the public and policymakers is especially critical to implementing effective nature conservation strategies to protect biodiversity.