vibe coding

Writing software by describing it and accepting whatever comes back. Collins Word of the Year in 2025; the software is running somewhere.

Of software: able to take actions, not just answer questions. The word of 2024–25 in every keynote and pitch, used so often that 'agentic' became a joke about buzzwords before most people had seen an agent.

The researcher who was a founding member of OpenAI, ran Tesla's Autopilot vision team for five years, returned to OpenAI for a year and left in 2024 to teach, whose free YouTube lectures on building a language model from scratch are the era's most watched classroom. He coined 'vibe coding' in February 2025 and 'Software 2.0' in 2017; the internet's entry for the engineer whose side projects become vocabulary.

The 2025 rebranding of prompt engineering for the agent era: not writing a clever instruction but deciding everything the model sees, the documents, the tool results, the history, the summaries of what it has forgotten. A chief executive proposed the phrase in June 2025, a well-known researcher agreed, and the labs published guides under the name within months.

The code editor built on a fork of VS Code, launched by four recent graduates in 2023 and by 2025 reported to be the fastest-growing software subscription in history, valued at nearly ten billion dollars. The record notes that it made 'vibe coding' physically possible, that a child using it is filed under Cursor Kid, and that its tab key is the most-praised piece of UI of the era.

A person who has shipped an app with an AI code editor and no understanding of what it does, and is proud of both. The 2025 stereotype of the vibe coder, used affectionately by those who are one and otherwise by everyone else.

Writing instructions for a language model, as a profession. Died as a job title when the models stopped needing to be spoken to carefully, which took about three years.

The phrase a chatbot says when corrected, whether or not the correction was right, and the meme that grew around it in 2025 as programmers noticed their coding assistants opening every reply to a complaint with it before doing something different and equally wrong. Used by humans now as ironic capitulation. The record's entry for the sycophancy tell.