Andrej Karpathy coins "vibe coding"
On Feb 2, 2025 Andrej Karpathy posted on X: 'There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.' He described building projects by talking to Cursor Composer (with Claude Sonnet) and accepting changes without reading diffs. The term spread very quickly and became the name for AI-first, code-unread software development.
Key facts
- Posted Feb 2, 2025 on X by @karpathy
- Named tools: Cursor Composer with Sonnet, SuperWhisper for voice
- Describes accepting all changes, pasting error messages back without comment, and code growing beyond his comprehension, 'not too bad for throwaway weekend projects'
- 'Vibe coding' was named Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2025
What happened
A casual post describing a new way to program with LLM agents gave a name to a shift that was already happening, and it became one of the most-used AI terms of 2025.
Why it matters
It marks the cultural moment when non-experts and professionals began building software mostly by instructing AI, the trend that coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex then pushed into mainstream engineering.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created (important-essays backfill; primary source checked)
Related posts (1)
- Andrej Karpathy Andrej Karpathy @karpathy · x · 2025-02-02
Cited as a source by: 2025-02-02-karpathy-vibe-coding
Related events
- Andrej Karpathy's essay "Software 2.0": neural networks as a new way to write software ★★★
- Claude 3.7 Sonnet (hybrid reasoning) and Claude Code preview ★★★★
Sources (2)
- officialAndrej Karpathy on X: vibe coding
- pressCNN: 'Vibe coding' named Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year (Nov 6, 2025)
id: 2025-02-02-karpathy-vibe-coding · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline