Vibe Coding
Building software by describing what you want to an AI in plain English, rather than writing code manually.
Full Definition
Vibe coding is a software development approach where you describe what you want to build in natural language and an AI tool generates the code. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI, former Tesla AI lead) in a February 2025 tweet where he described "giving in to the vibes". Focusing on what you want the software to do rather than the technical implementation. Unlike no-code platforms like Bubble or Webflow, vibe coding produces real, standard code. React apps, Python backends, full-stack applications. The difference is that an AI writes most of it based on your descriptions. You guide the process through conversation, describing features, pointing out bugs, and iterating on the result. The most common setup for vibe coding is Cursor (an AI code editor) paired with Claude or GPT-4 as the underlying model. Searches for "vibe coding" went from near zero in January 2025 to over 90,000 monthly by early 2026, reflecting a genuine shift in how people think about building software.
Examples
A founder describes a project management app to Cursor and gets a working prototype in an afternoon, iterating through conversation to add features
A designer builds a custom portfolio site by describing the layout and interactions they want, without writing CSS or JavaScript manually
A small business owner creates an internal tool to track inventory by telling the AI what fields they need and how the search should work