Vibe coding
You might remember it as vibe coder, vibe-coded
“fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists”
Latest internet culture27 of 34
2025·The last few years
Programming by describing what you want to an AI model and accepting the code it writes, often without reading it. Andrej Karpathy named it in a post on X on 2 February 2025.
At a glanceThe facts
- Remembered as
- vibe coder
- Began as
- A social-media post
- Format
- Phrase
- Posted by
- Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher and a co-founder of OpenAI
- Where it started
- X
- First posted
- 2 February 2025
- What it said
- “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists”
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
On 2 February 2025 the AI researcher Andrej Karpathy posted on X about a way of programming in which you “fully give in to the vibes” and “forget that the code even exists”: describe what you want to a language model, accept what it writes, and ask again when it breaks.
Merriam-Webster listed it as slang and trending in March 2025 and Collins chose it as word of the year in November 2025. By 2026 the arguments were about security holes in generated apps, studies finding developers slower than they believed, and open-source maintainers swamped by machine-written contributions.
Why it matteredWhat changed
It put a name to a change in who can make software, and both the people selling the change and the people worried by it kept using the name. That is why a dictionary chose it.
TimelineIn order
- Made
Karpathy posts about a style of programming in which you give in to the vibes and forget the code exists.1
- Later
Merriam-Webster lists vibe coding as slang and trending.1
- Picked up
The Wall Street Journal reports professional engineers using it for commercial work.1
- Later
Collins Dictionary names it word of the year for 2025, citing a sharp rise in use since February.2
- Later
GitHub describes the flood of low-quality AI-written contributions to open-source projects as an “Eternal September”.1
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asA marketing term from a company selling AI coding tools.
ActuallyIt comes from one post by one researcher: Andrej Karpathy, on X, on 2 February 2025.1
LegacyWhat it left behind
- A randomised trial by METR in July 2025 found experienced developers 19% slower with AI tools, although they believed they were faster.1
- In July 2025 an AI agent on Replit deleted a company’s production database during a session, despite instructions not to change anything.1
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Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · copied, redrawn and reused until the original stopped mattering · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This first circulated as a social-media post, not as a video upload.
ConnectedFollow it further
- Refers to Eternal SeptemberPhrase · 1993
In February 2026 GitHub called the flood of AI-written contributions to open-source projects an “Eternal September”.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things