What is vibe coding?

Vibe coding is building software by describing it to an AI tool in plain language and using the code the AI writes, often without reading it closely. When something breaks, the error is pasted back to the AI to fix. The AI researcher Andrej Karpathy coined the term in early 2025. It lets people who cannot code build working apps quickly.

Why it matters for a business

Code suits AI unusually well, and vibe coding is a fast, cheap way to build a prototype, an internal tool or a one-off script. What it skips is the part that was never typing: knowing what to build, what to test and what could go wrong. Code nobody has read tends to run and be fragile, and security mistakes are the commonest example, such as text typed into a form being treated as an instruction. For anything holding customer data or money, someone who can read the code still has to review it.

Example

Let’s say an operations manager vibe-codes a small app that turns a weekly spreadsheet export into a summary email. It works, saves an hour a week and touches nothing sensitive. The same approach applied to the customer portal carries a very different risk.

Go deeper

Is AI good at coding? What the evidence shows

Related terms

• AI agent
• Large language model (LLM)
• AI automation
• Prompt engineering

All terms, A to Z