Vibe Coding
What vendors mean: anyone can build software now. What it actually means: you can generate working code by describing it in plain English — and inherit code nobody on your team fully understands.
The term
Coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, “vibe coding” describes building software by describing what you want in natural language and letting an AI model write the code — accepting the output, running it, and iterating by feel rather than reading every line. A non-engineer can now stand up a working prototype in an afternoon.
Why it matters to you
The upside is real. Prototypes, internal tools, and one-off scripts that used to require a developer and a two-week queue can now be built by the person who actually has the problem. That collapses the distance between an idea and a testable version of it.
The catch is ownership. Vibe-coded software works until it doesn’t — and when it breaks, “I described it and it worked” is not a maintenance plan. Code your team didn’t write and doesn’t understand is a liability the moment it touches real customers, real money, or real data.
What that means in practice: Vibe coding is superb for prototypes, throwaway tools, and learning. Treat anything customer-facing or handling sensitive data as production software — it needs review, tests, and a named owner. The skill that matters now isn’t typing code; it’s judging whether the code you were handed is safe to trust.