Techniques & Methods
Vibe Coding in plain English.
Also known as: vibe-coding,vibecoding
The one-sentence version
Building software by describing what you want to an AI and accepting its code largely on trust, iterating by feel rather than by reading every line.
Vibe coding is the practice of building software by telling an AI what you want in plain language, running whatever it produces, and steering by results — "that broke, fix it", "make the button bigger" — rather than reading and understanding every line of code. The term was coined in early 2025 and stuck because it captures a real shift: tools like Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, and Claude Code made it possible for people with little or no programming background to ship working apps. It works surprisingly well for prototypes, personal tools, and small products. It works badly for anything that must be secure, maintained by other people, or debugged under pressure, because nobody on the team understands why the code does what it does. Most experienced developers now use a mix: vibe-code the boilerplate and the experiments, read carefully anything that touches money, user data, or production.