You’re not writing the code. You’re describing a feeling and watching the model chase it.
The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in a February 2025 post describing a new way of building software: give an AI model a goal in plain language, accept its output, ask for changes the same way, and keep iterating — “fully giving in to the vibes” rather than reading and understanding the generated code line by line. It’s new enough that peer-reviewed literature is only just starting to catch up; the first serious empirical study of how people actually vibe code, and where it breaks down, appeared as a 2025 preprint rather than a published paper.
That’s the exact confession this essay is making about itself: “you can vibe code your way to write code, or feed it the code and ask what it means, edit, iterate, copy and paste. You have been warned” — and the essay’s own follow-up, about ending up with “a graveyard of unfinished projects,” is close to what the early research is finding: speed goes up, but so does the number of projects abandoned once the vibes run out and something actually needs to be understood.
Source: Andrej Karpathy, post on X, February 2, 2025 — origin of the term, not peer-reviewed; Sarkar, A. & Drosos, I. (2025), “Vibe coding: programming through conversation with artificial intelligence,” arXiv:2506.23253 (Microsoft Research) — genuine empirical study, but a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed.