Vibe coding is a genuinely new way of building software, not a rebrand of an old one, and it deserves a real definition before this tutorial uses it a hundred more times. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 to describe a workflow where you describe what you want in natural language and let an AI agent handle code generation, execution, and iteration rather than typing every line yourself. It caught on fast enough that Collins English Dictionary named it their Word of the Year for 2025 , and by 2026 it's not a novelty; it's a standard way real software gets built.

This article is a genuine, start-to-finish vibe coding project: building the classic arcade game Breakout , using an AI coding assistant to generate every piece, with every prompt shown, every resulting code block explained in real detail, and the complete, tested game assembled at the end. This isn't a toy example.…