Vibe coding definition
Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want to an AI model and accepting the code it writes without reading it closely. You judge the result by running it and paste any errors back into the chat. Andrej Karpathy coined the term in February 2025.
Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder and former head of AI at Tesla, described vibe coding in a post on X in February 2025. You talk to the model, accept every change it suggests, paste error messages back without comment, and mostly forget that the code exists. He presented it as a fun way to build throwaway weekend projects. The phrase spread fast enough that Collins Dictionary made it its word of the year for 2025.
How does vibe coding work?
There are two common setups. Browser-based app builders such as Lovable, Bolt and v0 turn a chat into a running app and host it for you. AI code editors and agents such as Cursor and Claude Code work inside a real repository, where the code is right there to read if anyone decides to.
Either way the loop is the same: say what you want, then react to whatever runs. The person in the loop behaves more like a product owner than a programmer.
Vibe coding vs. AI-assisted coding
The term now gets used for any coding done with AI, which blurs a useful line. A developer who lets an agent write the code but reads the diff, runs the tests and could explain every change is doing AI-assisted development. Vibe coding is the version where nobody reads the code at all. Simon Willison argued for keeping that distinction in a March 2025 post titled "Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding".
Is vibe coding OK for a company website?
For a prototype or an internal tool, often yes. A public B2B site is different, because vibe coding tends to skip what nobody asked for out loud: spam protection on forms, keyboard and screen reader access, structured metadata, a CMS the marketing team can actually use, API keys kept out of the browser. None of that shows up when you click through the site, and clicking through is how a vibe-coded site gets checked.
The cost tends to arrive later, the first time someone has to change the site and finds code that nobody designed.
Related terms
- Agentic codingAgentic coding is software development where an AI agent does the hands-on work. It reads the codebase, edits files, runs commands and tests, and keeps iterating until the task is done. The developer sets the goal, reviews the result and decides what ships.
- AI agentAn AI agent is software that uses a language model to work toward a goal on its own, step by step. It decides what to do next, calls tools such as search, APIs or a browser, checks the result and keeps going until the task is done or it needs a human.
- Generative AIGenerative AI is artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, images, audio or code, from a prompt. It learns patterns from large amounts of training data and produces output that resembles that data, instead of only sorting or scoring what already exists.