What Does “vibe coding” Mean?

Vibe coding means building software by describing what you want to an AI model in plain language and running the code it writes, often without reading that code closely.

Part of speech

noun (also written vibecoding); vibe code is used as a verb

Category

Larpmaxxing slang

Meaning in context

You describe what you want in ordinary language, an AI model writes the code, you run it, and if something is wrong you describe the problem and let the model change it again. The defining part is what you skip: reading the code. Merriam-Webster’s slang entry calls it writing computer code in a somewhat careless fashion, with AI assistance, and notes that the person doing it does not need to understand how or why the code works.

That is narrower than using AI to program at all. Simon Willison, writing a few weeks after the term appeared, drew the line plainly: vibe coding means building software with a language model without reviewing the code it writes. A developer who reads, tests and could explain every line the model produced is doing ordinary programming with a powerful tool, however much of the typing the model did.

The term is used both ways, proudly and as a put-down. For a prototype, a one-off script or a weekend project it is a fast way to get something working. Said about code heading into production, it is usually a warning: nobody may know what the program actually does, which is where the criticism of it concentrates, on security holes and on code that becomes hard to maintain.

Where it comes from

Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and a former AI leader at Tesla, named it in a post on X on 2 February 2025. He described a new kind of coding where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists, and said it was not too bad for throwaway weekend projects.

The phrase spread almost immediately. Merriam-Webster listed it among its slang and trending terms the following month, and on 6 November 2025 Collins Dictionary named vibe coding its Word of the Year for 2025.

Examples

• He vibe coded the whole landing page in an afternoon and still could not tell you what half the files do.
• Vibe coding is fine for the prototype; the version that touches customer data gets a real review.
• She described the bug three different ways until the model fixed it, which is about as pure as vibe coding gets.

How it connects to larpmaxxing

Vibe coding made a new picture of what programming looks like: one person, several AI agents, terminals full of diffs and test runs moving by themselves. Codemaxx is that picture as a prop, a wall of agent terminals that work on their own, which is larpmaxxing applied to looking like you ship code.

More from the dictionary

This entry is part of the LARP dictionary, which covers the vocabulary of live-action role-play and the internet slang that grew up around it. The two pillar pages are what LARP is and what larpmaxxing means.