What is vibe coding?

Where the term comes from

Andrej Karpathy, a cofounder of OpenAI, coined the phrase in a February 2025 post on X. As MIT Technology Review recounted, he described giving in to the vibes and accepting every suggestion from his AI coding tool. He also described pasting error messages back into it, which he said usually fixed the problem. On November 6, 2025, the BBC reported that Collins Dictionary had named it word of the year.

How it works

A person describes the app, website or feature they want in everyday language. A coding tool built on a large language model (LLM), the kind of AI system behind chatbots, generates the code. The person judges the result by running it instead of reading it. They ask for changes with further prompts.

The term is narrower than AI-assisted programming in general. MIT Technology Review's explainer says a developer who checks and adjusts AI-written code along the way is not vibe coding. It says the practice means letting the tool take full control. Some definitions are broader. Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey defined it as generating software from LLM prompts.

Why it matters

The BBC noted that vibe coding lets people with no programming knowledge make basic apps, though the code is not guaranteed to work. MIT Technology Review, drawing on interviews with engineers, reported that the approach suits small, low-stakes projects. It said the approach becomes riskier for larger systems that handle user data or need security measures, because LLM-written code can contain errors. In the 2025 Stack Overflow survey, 72% of respondents said vibe coding was not part of their professional work. A further 5% said so emphatically.

Where things stand in 2026

Lovable, a vibe-coding platform, has passed $600 million in annual run-rate revenue, cofounder Fabian Hedin said on September 24, 2026, according to TechCrunch. The outlet also reported an August 2026 funding round that valued Lovable at $13.3 billion.

On September 25, 2026, TechCrunch reported that the security firm UpGuard had found around 16,000 databases hosted on the developer platform Supabase that exposed some personal data. TechCrunch presented the research as evidence that vibe-coded apps can expose private data when they are set up incorrectly. Supabase told the outlet that it had not seen the research. It said its projects are secure by default, and that customers control how their own projects are configured.