Big Tech pours billions into artificial intelligence with promises of world-changing breakthroughs. Valuations climb into the trillions. Job cuts mount in the thousands. Yet a different story unfolds among everyday users who treat AI as a playful collaborator rather than an existential force. They build small tools for personal problems. They experiment without grand ambitions. And they find genuine satisfaction in the process. The practice known as vibe coding emerged in early 2025 when Andrej Karpathy, the prominent AI researcher and former Tesla and OpenAI leader, described a new way of working with large language models. He urged developers to “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” Wikipedia records the term’s rapid adoption , noting its selection as Collins English Dictionary Word of the Year for 2025. What began as slang for conversational prompting quickly spread beyond professional coders.…