“Vibe coding,” the internet’s buzzword du jour, has officially become Collins Dictionary’s word of 2025. This term, coined by former OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy earlier in the year, describes a new approach to software development increasingly powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
Forget painstaking lines of code. Vibe coding champions a more intuitive method: users describe what they want their software or application to achieve, essentially “telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself.” As Christian de Looper writes for Mashable, vibe coding is “a type of software development that doesn’t require any traditional coding skills. You simply describe the type of software, app, or tool you want to create and let AI do the rest.”
While the concept might sound fantastical, several powerful AI platforms are already demonstrating their ability to execute these high-level instructions. OpenAI’s GPT-5, Claude 4.1 Opus, and Grok 4 (Expert) all attempt this “vibe coding” task with varying degrees of success.
This seemingly effortless approach has resonated far beyond the tech world. It reflects a broader cultural shift towards AI integration in everyday life. Collins Dictionary highlights that vibe coding “captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology.”
Beyond mere novelty, the rise of vibe coding raises important questions. Is it truly revolutionary or merely reckless? While some experts hail it as a democratization of software development, making creation accessible to non-programmers, others express concerns about potential pitfalls like bias in AI outputs and unforeseen consequences of relinquishing control to algorithms.
Regardless of its ultimate impact, vibe coding is undeniably a trend worth watching. It signals a future where technology might be less about technical expertise and more about clear intentions – essentially, programming by vibes.
