A year ago, Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe coding” to describe a gleefully reckless way of programming: you prompt, hand the keyboard to an AI, accept everything it spits out, don’t read the diffs, iterate by pasting error messages back in. It was a great label for a real thing - building quick prototypes or MVPs on pure AI autopilot.

The problem is that “vibe coding” has become a suitcase term. People now use it to describe everything from a weekend hack to a disciplined engineering workflow where AI agents handle implementation under human oversight. These are fundamentally different activities, and conflating them is causing real confusion - and real damage.

What vibe coding actually is

Vibe coding means going with the vibes and not reviewing the code . That’s the defining characteristic. You prompt, you accept, you run it, you see if it works. If it doesn’t, you paste the error back and try again. You keep prompting.…