Vibe coding

Vibe coding is building software by telling an agent what you want and steering by outcomes rather than by reading code. Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase in early 2025 for a mode of fully giving in to the vibes and forgetting the code exists: you describe, the agent writes, you run it, you describe the next change. The code is still there; you've just stopped treating it as the thing you author.

The term split almost immediately. To critics it means unreviewed slop shipped by people who can't read what they built, and there is plenty of that. To people who do it well it means something narrower: a tight loop of prompt, run, look, correct, with a person who knows what 'working' looks like at the controls. Same tools, very different results, and the difference is the operator.

The honest rule is about stakes. Full vibe mode, where nobody reads the code, is fine for prototypes, personal tools, one-off scripts and anything you can throw away. It is not fine for production systems, money, or other people's data; there the loop keeps its shape but human review, automated checks and a written spec come back in. This school teaches the second kind: you don't have to write the code, but you do have to be able to judge it.