Vibe coding
- Industry term
Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want, running what the AI produces, and steering by how it looks and behaves, while paying little attention to the code itself.
A visible trial reveals only the behavior it exercises. It lets you explore an idea without reading the implementation, but cannot establish unseen properties such as password handling or behavior on inputs you haven't tried.
Where you’ll meet it
In an afternoon you vibe-code a page where coworkers sign up for the office holiday party, and it works when you click through it. Tomorrow you plan to email the link to the whole office. It stores each person's name, email address, and dietary needs.
What to do
Before sharing it, ask the AI to identify where sign-up details are stored and which access rules protect them. Have it run a check using a separate visitor account, then inspect the result before sending the link.
Easy to mix up
In AI pair programming, you steer through short exchanges about the code, explanations, and checks. In vibe coding, you steer mainly by trying what the software visibly does.
Check yourself
You vibe-code a script that renames the photos on your own laptop by the date they were taken. Nobody else will use it. What check suits it?
Go deeperThe phrase began narrow, and unread code gets harder to change
Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase in a February 2025 post about giving in to the vibes and forgetting that the code even exists. Collins Dictionary named vibe coding its Word of the Year for 2025. As it spread, it came to cover almost any AI-assisted coding, and some programmers, Simon Willison among them, have argued for keeping its original sense.
Without written requirements, later edits may preserve the appearance while breaking behavior you relied on. A short list of expected behaviors provides a reference for checks after each change.
Sources
- The Collins Word of the Year 2025 is vibe coding, Collins Dictionary
- Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding, simonwillison.net