Building software by telling an AI what you want instead of writing the code yourself.
Vibe coding means making a program by describing it to an AI, running whatever it produces and asking for changes, rather than writing the code line by line. You mostly judge whether it works, not how the code looks.
AI researcher Andrej Karpathy coined the term in a post on X in February 2025, and Collins Dictionary named it its Word of the Year for 2025. It lets people with no coding background build simple games or web pages.
But code you don't understand is hard to fix and may hide security holes. Karpathy himself later said he mostly saves vibe coding for routine code or unfamiliar programming languages.
Think of it like this
Imagine asking an artist friend to draw for you: "Make the cat bigger, make the sky orange." You only look at the result and ask for tweaks. You get a cool picture fast, but since you don't know how it was drawn, some changes get hard.
For example
Say "Make a game where pressing a button adds a point," run it, then ask, "Make the score bigger."
Records about this
Source-checked moments from AI history.
The coiner of the term publicly narrowed its scope. His own rebuttal to stretching vibe coding to cover production development
The word that defined software discourse in 2025. Collins Dictionary named it its 2025 Word of the Year and added it to the dictionary