Everyone keeps saying it. Half the people saying it can't define it. I spent three weeks finding out whether the thing they're describing actually holds up when you're building something real.
Let me define vibe coding properly, because the term has been stretched to the point where it means almost anything involving AI and code.
Vibe coding is a development workflow where you describe what you want in natural language, often imprecisely, often iteratively and let an AI tool generate, modify, or explain code based on your intent rather than your specification. The "vibe" is the feeling of directing rather than writing, of being a composer who sketches melodies and lets the AI fill in the notation.
The term was popularised by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 and it resonated because it named something a lot of developers were already experiencing. You're not doing traditional programming. You're not doing no-code. You're doing something in between, guiding an AI through a problem using natural language plus occasional code review, trusting the tool to handle the implementation details while you stay at the problem level.
The debate is whether this is a legitimate development methodology or a fast path to unmaintainable code that works until it doesn't.
