Vibe Coding
Building working software by describing it in natural language — no code written by hand.
Term popularized by Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy), Feb 2025.
What it is, why now
Vibe coding is the practice of building functional software by describing what you want in natural language and letting an AI write all the code. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 and named Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2025. Where traditional programming requires fluency in syntax, libraries, and architecture, vibe coding requires fluency in problem articulation — "I want an app that takes a photo of a menu and shows me what each dish looks like."
The mechanic is straightforward: the human author describes intent in prose, the AI agent (Cursor + Claude, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, etc.) generates working code, the human checks the output and iterates by re-describing. The author often does not read or understand the resulting code in any conventional sense. Karpathy made this explicit in his MenuGen essay: "I basically don't really know how MenuGen works in the conventional sense that I am used to." That admission landed harder than the code did.
Vibe coding is distinct from agentic engineering, even though the tools overlap. Vibe coding is one-shot, prototype-first, accepts opacity. Agentic engineering is iterative, production-aware, builds verification loops so agents self-correct. The two share infrastructure but answer different questions: vibe coding asks "can a non-programmer ship something?" Agentic engineering asks "can a senior engineer 10x by directing agents?"
How we got here
- Feb 2025
Karpathy coins the term
Andrej Karpathy posts a tweet about "vibe coding" — letting AI write all the code while you describe what you want. The term goes viral within 48 hours.
- Mar 2025
Merriam-Webster adds it as slang
The dictionary acknowledges "vibe coding" as a trending term — unusually fast for a piece of programmer slang. Signal that it's escaped the AI engineering bubble.
- Apr 2025
MenuGen — first complete case study
Karpathy ships a real product (menugen.app) built entirely by vibe coding. Documents the "80% in 30 minutes / 20% in 40 hours" pattern — the first honest accounting of where the model breaks down.
MenuGen essay - Late 2025
Collins Word of the Year
Collins Dictionary names "vibe coding" its Word of the Year for 2025. The term has now jumped from Twitter into mainstream English.
- 2025-2026
Tools mature: Lovable, Replit, Bolt, v0
Whole product category emerges around the vibe coding workflow. Lovable, Bolt.new, Replit Agent, Vercel v0 — all betting on "non-developer ships product" as the dominant new market.
- Apr 2026
Backlash phase begins
Stack Overflow blog post: "A new worst coder has entered the chat: vibe coding without code knowledge." Industry starts dividing into vibe-coding-tolerant and vibe-coding-hostile camps. The conversation shifts from "can you?" to "should you?"
The 6 pieces that matter most
Curated from across Burn 451's vaults. Each piece has an AI summary — click to read it on its home vault page.
Vibe coding MenuGen
From the Karpathy vault
The seminal essay. Read this first. Documents the entire arc — magic prototype → API hell → deploy purgatory → real product. The 80/20 pattern was named here.
Bespoke software — highly customized apps with AI
From the Karpathy vault
Karpathy's framing of why this matters economically: vibe coding makes it viable to build apps for n=1 use cases. The economics of personalized software finally work.
1 year of vibe coding — retrospective
From the Karpathy vault
Karpathy at the 12-month mark. What still works, what didn't, what the new failure modes are. Required reading before you commit a 6-month project to this workflow.
Programming changed dramatically — coding agents crossed a threshold
From the Karpathy vault
Karpathy's industry-level claim: not a refinement, a phase change. The before/after framing that anchors a lot of the 2025-2026 discourse.
Vibe coding SwiftUI apps is a lot of fun
From the Simon Willison vault
Simon's hands-on test on Apple's stack. Confirms the pattern generalizes beyond JavaScript/Python — even strict typed Swift works.
Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
From the Simon Willison vault
The personal case study. Simon ships a backlog of years-deferred projects in a quarter. The psychological shift is half the story.
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Concept page curated by @hawking520 · Burn 451 · Last updated 2026-04-14