Vibe coding names something programmers had been doing quietly and finally admitting to.

The term came from Andrej Karpathy in February 2025. Karpathy is a computer scientist, a co-founder of OpenAI and Tesla's former head of AI. He described a way of programming where you "fully give in to the vibes" and, in his own words, "forget that the code even exists." You tell an AI model what you want in ordinary language. It writes the code. You run it, say what's wrong, and let it try again. You don't read it.

That last part is what makes it vibe coding rather than just using an assistant. Judging the work by whether it runs, not by what it says, is either liberating or alarming, depending on who is watching.

Collins made it Word of the Year for 2025. In announcing the pick, Collins described it as programming by vibes, not variables. It said the word had spread well beyond Silicon Valley because it caught a wider shift towards having AI help with everything. Collins also acknowledged the argument still going on over whether vibe coding is revolutionary or reckless. Much of the rest of its 2025 shortlist was about technology too, from clanker (a mocking word for AI) to taskmasking (pretending to be busy at the office).

The argument is real. Supporters say people who never trained as engineers can now build working tools, which a New York Times columnist called "software for one". Critics answer that nobody can be accountable for code no one has read, and that such code is hard to maintain and can hide security holes. In mid-2025 the AI researcher Andrew Ng objected to the name itself. He said it wrongly suggests that engineers using AI are just going with the vibes.

The word has lasted because it names that tension: the speed, and how little the person doing it may understand.