Definition
Vibe coding is a way of building software where a person describes what they want in plain language, an AI model writes the code, and the person tests the result and asks for changes without reading or fully understanding the code itself. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, in a post on X on 2 February 2025, and it spread fast enough to become Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2025.
In a company, vibe coding shows up when a founder, a marketer or a product manager builds a landing page, an internal calculator or a prototype in an afternoon with a tool like Cursor, Claude Code or a browser-based app builder. For throwaway projects and demos this is a genuine productivity leap. It lets non-engineers show instead of tell, and it lets engineers test three approaches before committing to one.
The misconception is that vibe coding replaces software engineering. It does not. Code nobody has reviewed can carry security holes, hidden costs and bugs that surface with real users and real data. The professional version of the same idea is AI-assisted engineering: the same AI tools, but with a human who reads the diff, writes tests and owns the result. Vibe coding is great for prototypes. For anything that touches customer data or money, somebody must be accountable for the code.
In practice
A product manager vibe-coded a pricing simulator over a weekend to test a new plan structure with customers. It did its job in two weeks of interviews and was then rebuilt properly by the engineering team once the pricing was decided.
Why it matters
Vibe coding lowers the cost of trying ideas to almost zero, which changes how fast your company can learn. It does not lower the cost of running software in production, so be clear about which of your projects are experiments and which are products.
Frequently asked questions
- Is vibe coding safe for production software?
- Not on its own. Code that nobody has reviewed can contain security flaws, leak data or fail under load. Use vibe coding for prototypes and internal experiments, and have an engineer review, test and take ownership of anything that handles customer data, payments or runs at scale.
- Who coined the term vibe coding?
- Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla, introduced the term in a post on X on 2 February 2025. He described giving in to the vibes, accepting AI-generated code and forgetting the code even exists. The term became Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2025.