In February 2025, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy posted a short note about a new way of writing software. He called it "vibe coding": you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.
The idea was simple. Instead of typing every line yourself, you tell an AI tool what you want in everyday language and let it generate the program. You may not read the result closely. You go by whether it feels as if it works.
Less than a year later, Collins Dictionary named "vibe coding" its Word of the Year for 2025. It defined the term as the use of AI, prompted by natural language, to help write computer code. In other words, you tell a machine what you want rather than coding it all yourself.
Alex Beecroft, managing director of Collins, said the choice "perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology." He also said it marked a shift that is making coding more accessible.
Karpathy, a former Tesla AI director and a founding engineer at OpenAI, had described building apps this way so you could "forget that the code even exists." That casual phrase now sits in mainstream dictionaries.
In September 2026, Merriam-Webster added 1,400 new words and definitions to its online dictionary. "Vibe coding" was among them. The entry traces the term to Karpathy's February 2, 2025, social media post and defines it as using an AI system to generate computer code in a given programming language.
The trip from a throwaway name to Word of the Year, and then into a dictionary, was fast. A work habit many people already recognized finally got a label, and the label stuck.