Andrej Karpathy coins 'vibe coding' in a viral post

Andrej Karpathy, a former OpenAI and Tesla AI researcher, posted a short description of a workflow he called “vibe coding”: prompting a coding assistant, accepting whatever it produced, and “forgetting that the code even exists.” He named Cursor’s Composer tool paired with Claude’s Sonnet model as the enabler, and added that he sometimes dictated prompts by voice using a dictation app rather than typing — “so it’s not even coding, I just speak.”

Karpathy framed the post as an offhand observation about what had become possible as coding models improved, rather than a manifesto. He later described it as “a shower of thoughts throwaway tweet” whose engagement he could not have predicted. But the phrase filled a gap: developers already prompting models and shipping code without close review had no settled name for the practice, and “vibe coding” supplied one quickly enough to spread through engineering Twitter, then technology press, within days.

The term’s subsequent life outran its origin. Within the year it was applied broadly to non-programmers building software through natural-language prompting, to hobbyist projects assembled without any code review, and — more critically — to a mode of professional development that skeptics argued produced unmaintainable or insecure code precisely because no one was reading it. Karpathy’s original post did not distinguish between careful and careless use of the practice; the distinction, and the argument over which was more common, was supplied by everyone who used the term afterwards.