What Is Vibe Coding?
Traditional coding vs. vibe coding, side by side. See how describing what you want replaces typing every line by hand.
Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want in natural language and letting an AI model generate and adjust the code, while you steer, review, and decide what ships. Toggle between the two workflows below to see what actually changes.
- 1Read the docs for the library you need
- 2Write boilerplate and imports by hand
- 3Type every line of the implementation
- 4Chase down syntax errors one at a time
- 5Run it, and hope it works
Where the term comes from
Former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe coding” in February 2025, describing a style of building software where you “fully give in to the vibes”: you describe what you want, accept AI suggestions, and iterate by prompting rather than typing every character yourself. The name stuck because it captures something real, the feel of coding changes, even though the underlying engineering discipline still matters just as much.
Vibe coding shines for
- Prototypes and proofs of concept
- One-off scripts and automations
- Scaffolding new UI from a description
- Exploring an unfamiliar library quickly
Be more careful with
- Security-critical or payment-handling code
- Code with tight performance budgets
- Anything you can't explain line by line
- Changes you can't easily test before shipping
Key takeaways
- Vibe coding replaces typing with describing and reviewing.
- You are still responsible for what ships, the AI is not.
- It is fastest for prototypes, slowest to trust for critical systems.