Vibe coding
Building software by telling an AI what you want and accepting the code it writes without reading it closely. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 and named Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2025. It is great for throwaway tools and risky for anything that handles money, customer data, or has to keep working.
In plain English
You describe the app. The AI writes it. You run it, something’s off, you describe the fix, it writes that. You never look at the code. That’s vibe coding, and Karpathy’s original post said to “forget that the code even exists.”2
In the real world
- A non-programmer with a working website after one weekend with Claude Code.
- A startup demo that falls over the first time a real customer uses it.
- “I vibe coded a tool for that” as a normal sentence at work.
When to use it
- Prototypes, personal tools, internal scripts, anything disposable.
- Learning what’s possible before you pay someone to do it properly.
When not to use it
- Anything that touches money, customer data, or logins.
- Anything you’ll still be running in a year. Someone will have to read that code eventually. Make it sooner.
Good, bad, ugly
- Good: people who could never build software now build software.
- Bad: code nobody read has bugs nobody knows about.1
- Ugly: a vibe-coded app holding real customer records. See also AI slop, same disease, different output.
Key facts
- Coined
- February 2025, Andrej Karpathy
- Word of the Year
- Collins English Dictionary, 2025
- The tell
- Nobody read the code. It works until it doesn't.
Common questions
Is vibe coding bad?
For a prototype, a personal tool, or a weekend project, it's great. For anything that handles money, customer data, or has to keep working, somebody needs to read the code.
Do I need to know how to code?
No. That's the point and the problem. Merriam-Webster's definition includes that the coder does not need to understand how or why the code works.
What tools do people vibe code with?
Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and the app builders inside chat tools. Any coding agent will do.
References
- vibe codingMerriam-Webster, Slang & TrendingView source
- Vibe codingWikipediaView source