vibe coding

Vibe coding is building software by prompting an AI model in plain language and accepting the code it writes without reviewing it.

A vibe coder describes what they want and judges the result by trying the app rather than reading the code. When Andrej Karpathy named the practice in February 2025, he described accepting every change unread and pasting error messages back without comment.¹ He judged the method acceptable for throwaway weekend projects.

The appeal is speed, and access for people who cannot program. Kevin Roose of the New York Times, not a programmer, built small apps with tools such as Bolt. In March 2025 Jared Friedman of the accelerator Y Combinator said AI wrote 95% of the code at a quarter of its newest startups. Those founders were highly technical, he added.² By 2026 the practice was reaching phones, and investors asked whether companies would build software instead of buying it.

The risk lies in what nobody reads. In May 2025 a report by a Replit employee described a scan of 1,645 web apps built with the rival service Lovable. It found 170 that let anyone read their users’ data.³ In July 2025, Replit’s coding agent deleted a live company database during a code freeze.⁴

The meaning is contested. Merriam-Webster’s slang page says the coder need not understand how the code works.⁵ Simon Willison, a programmer and blogger, argues that code a person has reviewed, tested and can explain is not vibe coding. Collins Dictionary, which named it Word of the Year for 2025, glosses it as using AI prompted in natural language to write code. A blog of the UK’s national cybersecurity agency adds “often without human review”. Merriam-Webster’s full entry of September 2026 defines it simply as using an AI system to generate code.

The term is often confused with agentic engineering, in which a developer directs coding agents but reviews their work and owns its design and correctness.

The name pairs vibe, informal English for a mood or feeling, with coding, the writing of computer programs. Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder and former head of AI at Tesla, coined it in a post on X on 2 February 2025. He described giving in to the vibes and forgetting that the code exists. Within weeks the term was used for any programming with AI help. Simon Willison called this semantic diffusion, in which a coined term weakens as it spreads. By October 2025 he judged the careless sense well established. A year after the coinage, Karpathy suggested agentic engineering for professional work under human oversight. Merriam-Webster added vibe coding to its dictionary in September 2026, crediting his post.