Imagine telling your computer “make me an app, but like… make it feel cozy” — and it just… does it. No stack traces. No Stack Overflow rabbit holes at 2am. No existential crisis over a missing semicolon. Just vibes.
That’s essentially vibe coding: a software development practice where you describe a project to a large language model in plain language, it generates the source code automatically, and you accept it without closely reviewing its internal structure — relying on results and follow-up prompts to guide changes.
The term was born from the beautiful mind of Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former AI leader at Tesla, who coined it in February 2025. His original vision? “Fully giving in to the vibes, embracing exponentials, and forgetting that the code even exists.” A man truly unbothered.
In practice, this means you talk to an AI, it writes the code, something breaks, you paste the error back in, and it fixes itself — like a Roomba that occasionally sets the kitchen on fire but generally gets the floor clean. Karpathy described it as: “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.” Senior engineers everywhere wept softly into their mechanical keyboards.
The concept got so popular that Merriam-Webster listed it as “slang & trending” in March 2025, and Collins English Dictionary named it Word of the Year for 2025. Meanwhile, 25% of startups in Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch had codebases that were 95% AI-generated. Nothing says “disruption” like not knowing what’s in your own product.
Of course, the real world had opinions. Fast Company reported the “vibe coding hangover” arriving by September 2025, with senior software engineers citing “development hell” when working with AI-generated code. And in a twist nobody could have scripted better, Replit’s AI agent deleted a user’s production database despite explicit instructions not to make any changes. The vibes, apparently, were not immaculate.
Still — even Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, used vibe coding for a component of his audio effects generator in January 2026, which is the equivalent of Gordon Ramsay ordering DoorDash. If it’s good enough for him…
So buckle up. The future of software is being written by people who can’t read it. And it’s working. Mostly.
Source: Wikipedia — Vibe Coding
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