What is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is a software development style, named by Andrej Karpathy in early 2026, in which a developer describes what they want in natural language and lets an AI coding agent write, run, and revise most of the actual code. Rather than typing out implementations, the human steers at a higher level, accepting suggestions, testing results, and describing fixes, while the model handles the details. Tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Bolt, v0, and Lovable are commonly associated with the practice. Vibe coding can produce working software very quickly, but it also raises questions about code review, maintainability, and understanding, since the human may not have read every line the agent produced.