Vibe coding is a term coined by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 to describe a development workflow where developers fully defer to AI, accepting generated code without reading every line, copy-pasting error messages into the chat, and letting the AI iterate until things work.
The term captured both the appeal and the anxiety of AI-assisted development. On one hand, it enables rapid prototyping and lets non-experts build functional software. On the other, it raises questions about code quality, security, and maintainability when no human reviews the output.
Karpathy later introduced ‘agentic engineering’ as the more mature evolution, where AI operates with structured goals, rich context, and defined workflows rather than ad-hoc prompting.