What is vibe coding?

A friend shows you a little app they made to split the grocery bill with their roommates. It adds up the receipts and says who owes whom. They've never written a line of code. They described what they wanted to an artificial intelligence (AI) tool, tried what came back, and asked for changes until it worked. There's a name for that now: vibe coding.

The term is very new. Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher and one of the founders of OpenAI, coined it in a post in February 2025. He described giving in to the vibes and forgetting that the code even exists. He said he barely touched the keyboard. He just talked to the tool and accepted what it wrote. The word spread fast. By November, Collins Dictionary had named "vibe coding" its word of the year for 2025.¹²

The loop is short, and it repeats.

• You describe what you want in plain words.
• The tool writes the code, and often runs it for you.
• You try it and notice what's wrong.
• You describe the fix, and it goes around again.

Many vibe coders don't read the code closely, and some never open it. Karpathy wrote that when something broke, he would usually paste the error message straight back in, with no comment.¹³

Code is a language with strict grammar. The models behind these tools learned it from enormous amounts of published code, alongside ordinary text. So they can turn "add up each person's share and round to the cent" into working instructions for a computer. For small, common jobs there are many similar examples to draw on, which is why the first try often works.³

It's great for small tools you make for yourself. A habit tracker. A spelling quiz for your kid. A page that turns a messy spreadsheet into a chart. If one breaks, you lose a few minutes, and nobody else is affected. Karpathy himself said the approach was fine for throwaway weekend projects, and for trying out an idea quickly it's hard to beat.¹

Bigger projects are a different story. Code nobody has read can hide security holes, such as a password written straight into the app where anyone could find it, or a sign-up page that quietly shows every visitor everyone else's details. It can be hard to fix or grow later, because no one knows how it works, including the person who made it. And International Business Machines (IBM) researchers who interviewed people who vibe code found a quieter cost: steering, checking, and keeping track of the AI's work wore people out.³⁴⁵

So here's a rule of thumb. If the thing you build only touches your own stuff, vibe away. If it holds other people's information or handles money, someone who can read code should look at it before anyone relies on it. That might be a friend who codes, or a professional you pay for an hour. Is there a small chore in your week that a little tool could take off your hands?