On February 2, 2025, Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" - a style of development where you describe what you want in plain English, the AI writes the code, you run it, fix problems by describing them, and ship. You stop reading the code in detail. You just feel the vibes and go.
Collins Dictionary named it their 2025 Word of the Year. By early 2026, over 110,000 developers search for it monthly, a $4.7 billion market has formed around it, and 63% of people now vibe coding were never traditional programmers.
What Is Vibe Coding?
Vibe coding is AI-first software development. Instead of writing every line yourself, you describe what you want to build in plain language, and an AI coding assistant - like Cursor, Claude Code, or Lovable - writes the implementation. You review, run, describe problems, and iterate.
The name comes from the "vibe" - the feeling of momentum when software builds itself and you're steering rather than typing. You're a product director giving instructions to an AI developer.
