This year, or in February 2025 to be precise, Andrej Karpathy, the former director of AI at Tesla and a founding member of OpenAI, gave the technology world a new word — Vibe Coding. Karpathy came up with the word to represent how AI can let some programmers “forget that the code even exists” and “give in to the vibes” while making a computer program. The word became an overnight buzzword in Silicon Valley. And as the year ended, UK’s Collins Dictionary picked it up as the word of the year. It was one of 10 words on a shortlist to reflect the mood, language and preoccupations of 2025.As to how Andrej Karpathy described the word, here’s the definition Karpathy shared on Twitter, “I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like a skill issue. There’s a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.”
Will Vibe Coding take away tech jobs
Is Vibe Coding and advanced capabilities of AI just the nail in the coffin when it comes to the traditional views of computer programming and software development skills? The debate is ongoing, with strong voices on both sides. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told CNBC earlier this year that app developers can now offload or automate more repetitive tasks, and they can generate new code using Large Language Models (LLMs). The ability for AI to subsidize an otherwise heavy workload has allowed these companies to build with fewer people.” Tan said. “That sounds a little scary, but on the other hand, what that means for founders is that you don’t need a team of 50 or 100 engineers. You know, maybe it’s that engineer who couldn’t get a job at Meta or Google, who actually can build a standalone business making 10 or 100 million dollars a year with 10 people,” Tan says. “Like that’s such a powerful moment in software.” Tan tweeted another not-so-happy stat for engineers: 25% of the current crop of Y Combinator startups used LLMs (AI large language models) to write 95% of their lines of code.Cursor CEO Michael Truell recently warned that Vibe coding builds ‘shaky foundations’ and eventually ‘things start to crumble’. Truell reportedly likened it to building a house by putting up four walls and a roof without knowing what’s going on under the floorboards or with the wiring. This coding method may be perfect for AI users looking to quickly mock up a game or website, but when it comes to more advanced programming, things have the potential to go wrong, he warned, as per a report in Fortune. “If you close your eyes and you don’t look at the code and you have AIs build things with shaky foundations as you add another floor, and another floor, and another floor, and another floor, things start to kind of crumble,” he said.
How Collins Dictionary defines Vibe Coding
Alex Beecroft, managing director of Collins, said, “The selection of ‘vibe coding’ as Collins’ Word of the Year perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology.” Collins’ definition of Vibe Coding states, “vibe coding” is “the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code.” Or, as a blog post on the dictionary’s website explains: “Basically, telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself.”
