Where the Term Came From
Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, coined "vibe coding" in early 2025 to describe a new approach to building software: you describe the vibe of what you want -- the outcome, the feel, the functionality -- and let AI translate that description into working code. You are not writing code. You are describing what the code should do.
Collins English Dictionary named it Word of the Year 2025. Y Combinator published data showing 25% of W25 cohort startups have codebases that are 95% or more AI-generated. This is not a fringe approach. It is how a meaningful portion of new software is being built right now.
The key insight: the software does not know whether a human or an AI wrote it. It runs the same either way. The skill is not knowing how to code -- it is knowing how to describe what you want specifically enough that AI can translate it into working code.
Who Can Actually Do It
Anyone who can describe outcomes precisely. The constraint is not technical knowledge -- it is outcome-description clarity. Can you describe what goes in, what process happens, and what comes out? If yes, you can vibe code.
A lawyer who can describe a contract analysis tool precisely can build it. A marketer who can describe a lead scoring system can build it. A mom who can describe a schedule tracker can build it. The background that helps most is not computer science -- it is clear thinking about what problems need solving and what solutions look like.
What You Can Build
Landing pages with email capture. Tools that call external APIs. Databases that store and retrieve information. Payment processing with Stripe. Blog systems with scheduled publishing. Client portals. Lead generation tools. Any web application a small business or creator needs. The ceiling is what software can do -- which is essentially anything.