Building software by describing what you want to an AI model and accepting the code it writes, often without reading it closely. The term was coined by the AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025, who described fully giving in to the vibes and forgetting the code exists. It lets people with little programming experience make working tools quickly, at the cost of not really knowing what is inside them.
Technical view
Describes a workflow where the developer iterates by prompt and observed behaviour rather than by reading and reasoning about the code: paste the error back, accept the diff, run it again. Karpathy framed it as suited to throwaway weekend projects. Proponents see it as a large expansion of who can build software; critics point to unreviewed security flaws, hard-coded secrets, unmaintainable structure and dependencies nobody chose deliberately. The usual distinction drawn is with AI-assisted engineering, where the human still reviews, tests and owns the code. Whether it scales beyond prototypes is disputed.
Related
Part of AI Terminology Index, section: Building and Using Models.