Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla, coined the term "vibe coding" in a post on X on 2 February 2025. He used it to describe a style of building software where a developer describes what they want in plain language, lets an AI model generate the implementation, and does not read the code closely, if at all. Within twenty-one months the term had gone from a niche description of his own workflow to Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year.

2 February 2025: the original post

Karpathy's post described a loose, exploratory way of building where code becomes secondary to outcomes. He was explicit that this was not a method for serious engineering work, but a way of moving fast on low-stakes projects and prototypes, where testing something quickly mattered more than understanding every line it produced.

"I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works." Andrej Karpathy, X, 2 February 2025

The phrase caught on immediately because it named something a lot of developers were already doing quietly with tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor and ChatGPT, but hadn't had a shared word for. It gave a casual, slightly self-deprecating workflow a name, which is usually the moment a niche practice turns into a movement.

February to spring 2025: from timeline to mainstream press

The post spread quickly beyond the developer corner of X. Within weeks, it was being written up by The New York Times, Ars Technica and The Guardian, each treating it as a genuine shift in how software gets made rather than a joke about a lazy workflow. That crossover from a technical audience to general news coverage is unusual for a programming term, and it's a large part of why "vibe coding" ended up on Collins Dictionary's radar at all: dictionaries track how a word moves through everyday language, not just how developers use it on a forum.

Through 2025: adoption at scale

What happened next wasn't just semantic. Karpathy's post landed at a moment when AI coding tools were already spreading fast through the developer population, and the vibe coding label gave that spread a name people outside engineering could understand.

GitHub Octoverse 2025 recorded 180 million developers and 630 million repositories on the platform, with roughly 1 billion commits pushed over the year. Thirty-six million new developers joined in 2025 alone, close to one every second, and 80% of those new developers used GitHub Copilot within their first week. AI-tagged repositories nearly doubled to 4.3 million, and in August 2025 TypeScript overtook both Python and JavaScript to become GitHub's most-used language for the first time.

Adoption and trust did not move together, though. Stack Overflow's 2025 Developer Survey found that 84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, up from 76% the year before, but only 29% said they trusted AI output to be accurate, down sharply from 40% in 2024. Vibe coding was becoming the default way a huge number of people wrote software at exactly the moment those same people were growing more sceptical of what it produced. That tension, more than the term itself, is why the story kept making news through the rest of the year.

November 2025: Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year

Collins Dictionary named "vibe coding" its Word of the Year 2025, announcing the choice in November 2025 alongside a shortlist that also included "clanker," "broligarchy," "aura farming," "taskmasking" and "biohacking." Collins' managing director, Alex Beecroft, tied the choice directly to what had happened in software development that year.

"The selection of 'vibe coding' as Collins' Word of the Year perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology," and the term "signals a major shift in software development, where AI is making coding more accessible." Alex Beecroft, Managing Director, Collins Dictionary, November 2025

CNN's coverage of the announcement noted the same point that had been building all year: whatever else it was, vibe coding had stopped being a Silicon Valley in-joke and had become a word ordinary people used to talk about how software gets made now.

The word won an award. The code still has to work.

Collins Dictionary recognised a cultural shift. It said nothing about whether the resulting code is secure, stable or ready for real users, because that was never what the term was describing in the first place.

See how we harden vibe-coded repos →

Who invented the term vibe coding?

Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla, coined the term in a post on X on 2 February 2025, describing a workflow where a developer prompts an AI model in natural language and largely stops reading the code it generates.

When did vibe coding become popular?

The term spread from social media into mainstream press coverage within weeks of Karpathy's original post in February 2025, and adoption of AI coding tools continued climbing through the rest of the year, culminating in Collins Dictionary naming it Word of the Year in November 2025.

Did Andrej Karpathy mean for vibe coding to be used in production?

No. Karpathy was explicit in his original post that the approach suited low-stakes projects and prototypes, not production software, a distinction that got lost as the term spread far beyond its original technical context.