Vibe Coding
A 2025–26 coined term for writing software by chatting with an AI agent — describing the vibe of what you want and accepting whatever code it generates.
In plain English
"Vibe coding" was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 to describe a new style of programming: you describe what you want in plain English, the AI writes the code, you accept it without reading it, and you fix bugs by chatting back. The term went viral because it captured a real shift in how people — especially non-engineers — are building software.
What makes it "vibes":
- You don't always read the diff
- You don't write the tests
- You don't always understand the failure modes
- It works often enough to feel magical
The tools that enable it:
- Lovable, Bolt, v0 — natural-language app builders
- Cursor, Windsurf — vibe coding in a real IDE
- Replit Agent — vibe coding in a hosted environment
- Claude Code, Codex — vibe coding in the terminal
The healthy debate: Some argue vibe coding democratises software-building and is the future. Others argue it's only safe for throwaway projects — production code still needs engineers who understand what runs. Both views are partly right; vibe coding is great for prototypes and dangerous for systems-of-record.