What is vibe coding?
Short answer
Building software by describing what you want in plain language to an AI coding tool and steering the result, rather than writing most of the code yourself. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. In practice it ranges from a non-programmer assembling a working app they could not otherwise have built, to an experienced engineer delegating the parts they already know how to write.
The longer version
Building software by describing what you want in plain language to an AI tool and steering what comes back, rather than typing most of the code yourself. Andrej Karpathy coined the term in early 2025 to describe a way of working where you stop reading every line and start judging the result by whether it does the thing.
In practice it covers a wide range. At one end, someone who has never programmed assembles a genuinely working tool they could not otherwise have built. At the other, an experienced engineer delegates the parts they already know how to write to save an afternoon. Both are doing the same thing at very different levels of ability to spot when the output is wrong.
The term gets used dismissively, usually to mean code nobody understands. That criticism is fair for anything load-bearing and unfair for the enormous category of software that just needs to exist and work — internal tools, prototypes, one-off scripts, small products with few users.
The full argument, with the rest of the picture around it:
Vibe Coding Killed the Idea Backlog. Now Everyone Has the Same Problem