Glossary
Vibe Coding
Meaning and details
Vibe coding is the practice of developing through conversation: you describe what you want, an agent writes, edits and runs the code, and you direct the results. The term, coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, spread...
Vibe Coding meaning
Building software by describing intent to an AI coding agent and steering the output, rather than writing every line by hand.
What is Vibe Coding?
Vibe coding is the practice of developing through conversation: you describe what you want, an agent writes, edits and runs the code, and you direct the results. The term, coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, spread because it named something real, a mode of building where the bottleneck shifts from typing to judging. The output is still code, versioned, deployed and owned by you; what changes is how it gets produced.
Why it matters to an indie builder: it collapses the distance between idea and prototype. A solo founder with taste and domain knowledge can now produce in a weekend what used to need a hired team, and the tooling, Claude Code, Cursor, Bolt, Lovable and the rest of the agent-harness field, is in a features arms race on your behalf. The honest caveat: velocity without verification is debt with interest. Studies of AI-built apps found the large majority carried exploitable weaknesses, which is why the technique pairs with specs and evals as stakes rise.
A concrete example: an internal dashboard for support metrics. Traditional path: three weeks of a contractor's time, thousands of euros. Vibe path: two sessions describing views, filters and the data model to an agent, with the database schema supplied as context; the working dashboard deploys on day three. The team reviews the generated queries, adds authentication and ships it to a private URL. Not one line hand-written, every line human-reviewed where it touches money and access.
Common mistakes: skipping review because it runs (agents produce plausible code with confident bugs; read the diff, run the tests), letting the agent invent security, auth checks and input validation are exactly the parts models get subtly wrong, no version control, the rollback story for conversational changes is git, always, vibe-coding production systems that hold money or personal data without evals and monitoring, and accepting architecture by accident: steer the folder structure and data model deliberately even when the code writes itself. The agent-harness and vibe-coding blocks on IndieBoot compare the field; the spec-driven-development entry covers the discipline that scales it.