Encyclopedia · 187 concepts

AI Agents & Applications · beginner · concept 155 of 187

Vibe Coding

Vibe coding is Andrej Karpathy's February 2025 term for generating software by prompting a model and accepting the output without reading it: you judge the result by whether it runs, not by whether the code is sound. It suits throwaway prototypes and personal tools. The common error is treating all AI-assisted work as vibe coding. Agentic coding describes how much the tool automates; vibe coding describes whether a human reviews the diff. Skipping review is where the security holes and unmaintainable code come from.

Key terms

accepting unreviewed codeKarpathy coinage (Feb 2025)prototype versus productionagentic coding contrastAI-generated code security debt

Where you meet it in the real world

Weekend prototypes and demos, internal one-off scripts, throwaway data cleanup tools, hackathon builds, prompt-to-app products such as Replit Agent and Lovable