01Where the term came from
On February 2, 2025, Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, described "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" in a post on X. He described talking to an AI editor by voice, accepting every change it suggested and pasting error messages back in until things worked.
He framed it as a way to build throwaway weekend projects, not a method for serious software. The name stuck anyway, because it described something millions of people had just started doing. By November, Collins Dictionary had picked "vibe coding" as its word of the year, defining it as turning natural language into computer code using AI.
02How vibe coding works in practice
The loop is short and repetitive. You describe a feature, the AI writes or changes the code, you run it, and you react to what you see rather than to what the code says.
- 1Describe the outcome"Add a page where users can upload a photo and see it cropped to a square." No file names, no functions.
- 2Accept the changesThe tool edits whatever files it decides to. In pure vibe coding you do not read the diff.
- 3Run it and lookYou check whether the app does what you asked by using it, not by reading the code.
- 4Paste the errors backWhen something breaks, the error message goes straight back to the AI with a request to fix it.
- 5Repeat until it worksProgress is measured in features that appear to work, which is both the appeal and the risk.
03Vibe coding vs AI-assisted coding
The two get used as synonyms, and that causes most of the arguments about whether vibe coding is good or bad. The difference is who understands the code at the end.
Most professional developers now use AI daily (51% of professional developers in Stack Overflow's 2025 survey said so), but they read, test and own what ships. Only about 15% of all respondents said they vibe code at all. The rest use AI as a fast assistant rather than a replacement for understanding.
| Vibe coding | AI-assisted development | |
|---|---|---|
| Reads the code | Rarely or never | Always, before it ships |
| Judges success by | Whether it seems to work | Tests, review and behavior |
| Typical user | Founders, designers, hobbyists | Professional developers |
| Best for | Prototypes and personal tools | Production software |
| Main risk | Hidden bugs and security holes | Over-trusting a plausible suggestion |
04The tools people use to vibe code
Two families of tools dominate. Browser-based app builders such as Lovable, Bolt and v0 handle hosting and setup, so a non-programmer can go from prompt to a live app without touching a terminal. Editor-based agents such as Cursor and Claude Code work inside a real codebase and suit people who can at least read code. The best vibe coding tools compares them by who they are for.
Website builders sit to one side of this. If what you want is a marketing site rather than an app, a builder that designs the page for you skips the code entirely; vibe coding vs AI website builders explains the trade.
05What vibe coding is good and bad at
It is genuinely good at getting from zero to something you can click. Landing pages, internal dashboards, small games, scripts and prototypes for user testing all come together in hours.
It struggles as a project grows. Each new prompt has more existing code to break, and nobody on the project knows how the pieces fit. Security is the sharpest edge: when Veracode tested AI models on security-sensitive tasks in 2025, they chose an insecure approach 45% of the time. Is vibe coding bad? goes through the evidence in detail.
- Good: prototypes, demos, one-off tools, learning what an idea feels like.
- Risky: anything with logins, payments, personal data or many users.
- Hard: long-lived products, where code nobody understands becomes a rewrite.
What people who tried it say
Hacker News commenters mostly agree on the definition and argue about the boundaries. Non-programmers describe it as a door into building things; experienced developers describe it as a prototyping mode that becomes a maintenance problem if nobody steps in.
- Ask HN: What does vibe coding mean for non-programmers?Hacker News
The original poster sees it as a way to prototype and learn rather than ship serious products. Commenters warn that it turns everyone into a code reviewer without the training, and suggest keeping vibe-coded software for personal use.
- Ask HN: What's your experience with vibe coding?Hacker News
Fast for prototypes and unfamiliar stacks, with technical debt building as projects grow. Git checkpoints, written plans and tests come up repeatedly as what makes it workable.
Looking for more first-hand opinions? Search Reddit for “what is vibe coding”. We link the live threads rather than summarizing them, so you read them in full.
Our take
"vibe coding" is a useful name for a real mode of working, not a new profession. Everyone building software now uses AI; the question that matters is whether anyone understands the result. Vibe code to explore, then decide whether the thing deserves to be understood.
Where this falls short
The term is young and people use it loosely. Some count any heavy AI use as vibe coding, which makes surveys and debates hard to compare. The survey figures here are from 2025, and adoption has moved quickly since.
If the thing you want to vibe code is a website, Orlume does the part vibe coding skips: a design pass decides layout, type and hierarchy before any code is written, and the result is a real Next.js site you can publish in one click.
Free to start · No card required · Live in one click
Sources
- 1.Karpathy's original "vibe coding" post · X (Andrej Karpathy)
- 2.2025 Developer Survey: AI · Stack Overflow
- 3.A quarter of startups in YC's current cohort have codebases that are almost entirely AI-generated · TechCrunch
- 4.AI-generated code poses major security risks in nearly half of all development tasks · SD Times, on Veracode's 2025 report
Researched and written by the Orlume team · Updated October 2026
Still stuck?