Vibe Modeling: Challenges and Opportunities

There is a pressing need for better development methods and tools to keep up with the growing demand and increasing complexity of new software systems. New types of user interfaces, the need for intelligent components, sustainability concerns, ... bring new challenges that we need to handle. In the last years, model-driven engineering (MDE) has been key to improving the quality and productivity of software development, but models themselves are becoming increasingly complex to specify and manage. At the same time, we are witnessing the growing popularity of vibe coding approaches that rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform natural language descriptions into running code at the expenses of code vulnerabilities, scalability issues and maintainability concerns. In this paper, we introduce the concept of textitvibe modeling as a novel approach to integrate the best of both worlds (AI and MDE) to speed up the development of reliable complex systems. We outline the key concepts of vibe modeling and highlight the opportunities and open challenges it presents for the future of modeling.