The term was coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, half as a joke: you "give in to the vibes", describe what you want, accept what the AI writes, and barely look at the code. It stuck, because it named something real: people with no programming background were suddenly shipping working apps, websites and tools.
Tools like Cursor, Lovable and Claude Code made this practical. You say what you want, the AI writes the code, you react to the result, and the loop repeats. The person steers with taste and judgment instead of syntax.
Why you keep hearing it
Because it is the most visible cultural shift in software right now. Non-technical founders demo apps they built in a weekend. Developers argue about whether the results are maintainable. Both sides are partly right: vibe coding is genuinely powerful for prototypes and personal tools, and genuinely risky when nobody understands the code running something important.
What it means for you
The barrier between "I have an idea" and "I have a working thing" has collapsed. A marketer can now build a calculator, a landing page or an internal tool without engineering help. Judgment about what to build, and what is good, matters more than ever. The typing was never the hard part.