Vibe coding is the practice of using generative AI to create software from high-level natural language descriptions, often through iterative prompting. The term can imply a loose, exploratory coding style, but in practical use it may also describe broader AI-assisted software generation that still requires review and testing.
Prompting a generative AI model to create software. That is, your prompts describe the software's purpose and features, which a generative AI model translates into source code. The generated code doesn't always match your intentions, so vibe coding usually requires iteration. Andrej Karpathy coined the term vibe coding in this X post. In the X post, Karpathy describes it as "a new kind of coding...where you fully give in to the vibes..." So, the term originally implied an intentionally loose approach to creating software in which you might not even examine the generated code. However, the term has rapidly evolved in many circles to now mean any form of AI-generated coding. For a more detailed description of vibe coding, see What is vibe coding?. In addition, compare and contrast vibe coding with: - specificational coding - conversational coding