Vibe Coding: AI-Driven, Spec-Free, Ship-When-It-Feels-Right

what is vibe coding

“Vibe coding” is a tongue-in-cheek term that started circulating on social media (especially Twitter/X) in early 2024. It describes a style of programming in which you:

1. Open an AI assistant (Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, etc.).
2. Describe—in plain English—what you want the code to do (“make a dark-mode landing page with a neon button that pulses”).
3. Copy-paste whatever the AI spits out without reading it too closely.
4. Run it. If it breaks, paste the error back into the AI and repeat.
5. Stop tweaking the moment it “feels” right on your screen.

In short, you’re coding by vibe rather than by specification, documentation, or deep understanding of the codebase. The AI is doing the heavy lifting; you’re just steering with high-level prompts and gut checks.

Key characteristics • Minimal manual typing.
• Little to no upfront design or tests.
• Heavy reliance on the AI to fix bugs and refactor.
• A “ship it if it looks okay” attitude.

Pros • Extremely fast prototyping.
• Lowers the barrier for non-engineers to build things.
• Great for throwaway demos or hack-day projects.

Cons • Code quality and security are often unknown.
• Hard to maintain or extend later.
• You may not understand (or even have read) the code you’re shipping.
• Can violate licenses or best practices without realizing it.

Origin The phrase was popularized by Andrej Karpathy in a January 2024 tweet: “There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding’, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

Bottom line Vibe coding is the “I’ll know it when I see it” approach to software development, turbo-charged by generative AI. It’s fantastic for quick hacks and learning, but risky for anything you expect others—or future-you—to maintain.