The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 where he wrote:

> There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. […] I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it. I “Accept All” always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I’d have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

It’s the same as non-vibe coding in 2026, but you stop pretending you wrote everything by hand.