It's been one of the biggest internet terms of the year, and now it's official: "vibe coding" is Collins Dictionary's word of 2025.

Beating runners up including clanker, aura farming, broligarchy, glazing, biohacking, and more, the term was coined in Feb. 2025 by former OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, who posted on X of a coding and software development mode that leans heavily on artificial intelligence, "where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists."

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Essentially, vibe coders don't actually code, instead they can describe what they're wanting to create and hand the reins to AI – and OpenAI’s GPT-5, Claude 4.1 Opus, and Grok 4 (Expert), all function with differing efficacy when it comes to vibe coding. Writing for Mashable, Christian de Looper described the term like this:

"Vibe coding is certainly the buzzword du jour. It's a type of software development that doesn't require any traditional coding skills. Rather, you simply describe the type of software, app, or tool you want to create and let AI do the rest."'

In a blog post, Collins Dictionary described the term as one "that captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology...Basically, telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself. It’s programming by vibes, not variables. While tech experts debate whether it’s revolutionary or reckless, the term has resonated far beyond Silicon Valley, speaking to a broader cultural shift towards AI-assisted everything in everyday life."

Mashable has a deeper dive into what exactly vibe coding is, a comparison of AI platforms' performance with vibe coding, as well as a guide for beginners wanting to get started vibe coding.