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Glossary Term

Vibe Coding

By The Codegen Team · Updated March 26, 2026

A development style where developers defer to AI, accepting generated code without detailed review, coined by Andrej Karpathy.

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.

In plain English

Building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting AI write all the code — no syntax knowledge required.

Why it matters

Vibe coding shifted who can create software. Non-technical founders, product managers, and designers can now produce working prototypes without writing code. That expanded the pool of builders significantly. It also created a new problem: code produced this way often works in demos but breaks under real production conditions, which is why the conversation around vibe coding has shifted toward what comes after the prototype.

In practice

A product manager opens Bolt, types "build a simple CRM that tracks contacts, notes, and follow-up dates," and has a working web app in under an hour. It looks right. It functions in the demo. Then a second user tries to log in and the auth breaks, because the AI picked a session management approach that works for one user at a time.

How Codegen uses Vibe Coding

Vibe coding and Codegen are solving different problems at different stages. Vibe coding gets you from nothing to something fast. Codegen is more useful once that something needs to become production software — code review, governance, structured task execution with audit trails. They are not competing tools; most teams that vibe code a prototype eventually hit a point where they need the discipline layer Codegen provides. Codegen does not make vibe coding better. It handles what comes after.

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