Vibe coding is a programming approach where developers use natural language prompts to instruct AI models, like large language models (LLMs), to generate code. Instead of manually writing code, developers describe what they want in plain English (or other languages), and the AI translates these descriptions into functional code. This method shifts the developer's role from writing code to guiding, testing, and refining AI-generated code.
The term "vibe coding" was popularized by Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla. He described it as a process where one can "just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works." Karpathy emphasized that this approach allows developers to focus on the creative aspects of software development, letting AI handle the technical details.