Vibe coding is building software primarily by prompting an AI tool and iterating on what looks right in the browser, rather than writing or carefully reviewing the underlying code yourself.
The term was popularized by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 to describe a fast, intuition-driven way of building software: you describe what you want, look at the result, and keep prompting until it looks right, without closely reading the code in between.
It's genuinely useful for prototyping, exploring ideas, and letting non-technical builders reach a working product without writing code themselves.
The risk is in what it optimizes for. "Looks right" and "is right" are different claims. One is about what you can see in a live preview, the other is about how the system behaves under conditions you didn't happen to test. Vibe coding, by design, only verifies the first one.
Not inherently. It's a fast way to explore an idea or reach a working prototype. It becomes risky specifically when the resulting app handles real users, real payments, or real data without ever getting the verification step vibe coding skips by design.
The term was popularized by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 to describe building software by prompting and iterating on what looks right, without closely reading or writing the underlying code.
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