What is vibe coding? Building software by telling an AI what you want instead of writing the code yourself

Building software by telling an AI what you want instead of writing the code yourself.

Vibe coding means making a program by describing it to an AI, running whatever it produces and asking for changes, rather than writing the code line by line. You mostly judge whether it works, not how the code looks.

AI researcher Andrej Karpathy coined the term in a post on X in February 2025, and Collins Dictionary named it its Word of the Year for 2025. It lets people with no coding background build simple games or web pages.

But code you don't understand is hard to fix and may hide security holes. Karpathy himself later said he mostly saves vibe coding for routine code or unfamiliar programming languages.

Think of it like this

Imagine asking an artist friend to draw for you: "Make the cat bigger, make the sky orange." You only look at the result and ask for tweaks. You get a cool picture fast, but since you don't know how it was drawn, some changes get hard.

For example

Say "Make a game where pressing a button adds a point," run it, then ask, "Make the score bigger."

Common mix-ups

Mix-upWith vibe coding, you can build anything all the way without knowing code.
ActuallyA small game just for you is fine, but a program that stores other people's personal data or handles money is a different story. Something like that needs checking by someone who can read code, plus tests that deliberately feed it strange inputs.
Mix-upThe person who coined it writes all his code by vibe coding.
ActuallyIn an October 2025 interview, Karpathy said he did not vibe-code his project nanochat. The AI kept misunderstanding his own unusual design and suggesting outdated functions, so he mostly used it just for autocomplete.

Try it in class

For teachers at the start of a lesson — or for students working on their own.

Question: What's the difference between an AI-made program that "runs" and one that's "right"?
Activity: Ask an AI, in words only, for "a game where the score goes up by 1 each time you press a button". Before testing, each group writes a test list (does 100 presses give 100 points? what happens on refresh?). Run through the list, mark pass or fail, and for each failure write down exactly what you'd need to say to get it fixed.