Jargon:Vibe coding
1 min read
Say this at the party
“Building software by describing what you want to an AI, accepting whatever it writes, and never really reading the code.”
In plain English
Normally, writing software means reading and understanding every line. With vibe coding you just talk: "make the button bigger", "add a login page", "it's broken, fix it". The AI writes the code and you judge the result by whether it seems to work.
It is brilliant for prototypes, weekend projects and tools only you will use. It gets risky when the thing has real users, real data or real money, because nobody actually knows what the code does.
Where it came from
Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, coined it in a post on X on 2 February 2025, describing a new kind of coding where you "fully give in to the vibes" and forget the code exists. Collins Dictionary made it its Word of the Year for 2025.
See it in action
A café owner asks an AI app builder for "a booking page with a calendar and a confirmation email". Twenty minutes later it works. They never open the code.
What people get wrong
- Not all coding with AI is vibe coding. If you read, test and understand what the AI wrote, that's just programming with a helper.
- It doesn't make developers redundant. A careful trial in 2025 found experienced developers were slower with AI tools, even though they felt faster.
Go deeper
- PostAndrej Karpathy, 2025The original "vibe coding" postWhere the term was born, in one short post.
- ArticleSimon Willison, 2025Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)The clearest line between vibe coding and careful coding with AI.
- PaperBecker et al. (METR), 2025Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer ProductivityThe study where developers felt faster with AI but were actually slower.
Related jargon
Drafted with AI, checked by the AI Council (Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini) and signed off by Phin.