Vibe coding

Chat → run → prompt again. You read little or none of the code.

Also called: Prompt-driven development (the more structured form)

The person describes what they want in plain language, runs what the AI produces, and reacts to the result with another prompt. Code goes largely unread; the running output is what gets judged. Prompt-driven development is the more structured form: the human still breaks the work into a deliberate sequence of prompts.

Andrej Karpathy coined the term in February 2025 for a style where you "fully give in to the vibes" and forget the code exists, which he framed as fine for throwaway weekend projects.

Within weeks the term spread well beyond developers. Simon Willison argued in March 2025 that if you have reviewed, tested and understood the code, it isn’t vibe coding; it’s software development with AI help. Collins named “vibe coding” its Word of the Year for 2025.

By February 2026 Karpathy wrote that agent-driven programming had become a professional default “except with more oversight and scrutiny,” and proposed the name agentic engineering for that. Vibe coding kept its original meaning: building without reading the code.

↺ Steps 2–4 repeat until it looks right.

1. 01Describe the goal in plain language.
2. 02Run what the AI produces, often in a browser-based builder or chat window.
3. 03Paste back errors, or describe what looks wrong.
4. 04Repeat until the result looks right. The code itself is rarely opened.

Typical tools: chat assistants; app builders such as Replit, Lovable and Bolt; coding agents set to accept every change.

Compare all five bands

Solid: AI does core work · Hatched: partial or informal · Dashed: done by people. Compare all bands

Good for: Discovery, learning, demos, throwaway tools

Avoid it for

• Anything other people will depend on
• Personal, student or other institutional data
• Sign-in, payments or access control
• Anything you couldn’t throw away tomorrow

Signs you’ve outgrown it

• Someone else starts using it
• It touches real data
• You can’t explain how it works
• Bugs come back after they’ve been fixed

Where it runs: A browser-based app builder (Replit, Lovable, Bolt), a chat assistant’s preview pane, or a personal laptop.

Data

Fake or public data only

Credentials

None that reach real systems

Hosting

A personal sandbox, never a campus domain

On campus

A sanctioned sandbox account under the enterprise agreement, so prompts stay inside contract terms

Compare environments across bands

• Personal space or sandbox only
• No real or institutional data
• Throw it away, or rebuild it properly before sharing

Risks

• Security holes: hard-coded credentials, missing access checks and unvalidated input, none of which show up when you only look at the output.
• Comprehension debt: no one understands the code well enough to fix it.
• Data leakage: pasting institutional data into consumer tools outside campus agreements.
• Shadow IT: a prototype quietly becomes a service no one supports.

1. Karpathy, post on X introducing “vibe coding,” Feb. 2, 2025
2. Willison, “Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding,” Mar. 2025
3. Collins Dictionary, Word of the Year 2025
4. Karpathy on “agentic engineering,” Feb. 2026, and Sequoia AI Ascent talk, Apr. 2026
5. Sarigoz, “Vibe coding vs spec-driven dev: a per-task decision guide,” BizStack, Sept. 11, 2026
6. Sarkar & Drosos, “Vibe coding: programming through conversation with artificial intelligence,” arXiv, 2025