What is vibe coding? A plain-English answer

What does vibe coding mean?

Before, building a website or an app meant writing code, line by line, in a language the computer understands. With vibe coding, you write what you want in the language you already speak: “add a booking form under the prices and send me an email when someone fills it in”. The AI writes the code, runs it and shows you the result. You react, ask for changes, and repeat.

So the skill shifts. You don’t need to know the syntax anymore. You do still need to know what you want, and whether what you got is actually right.

Why is it called vibe coding?

The name came from AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. He described a way of working where you “give in to the vibes”: you describe, accept what the AI gives you, and keep going without reading every line. The name stuck because it was honest about the trade: speed now, understanding later.

How does vibe coding work?

In practice it’s a loop:

1. You describe the thing. One page, one feature, one fix. Small asks work far better than “build me an app like Airbnb”.
2. The AI writes the code. Tools like Claude, Cursor, Lovable or Replit turn your description into working files.
3. You look at what it made. Click through it like a customer would.
4. You ask for changes. “The button’s hidden on my phone.” “Send the email to me, not the customer.”
5. You save a version that works. This is the step beginners skip, and it’s the one that saves you later.

What is vibe coding in AI terms?

There are three parts. The model is the AI that writes the code, like Claude or Gemini. The tool is the app you type into, which gives the model access to your files and a way to run them. And you are the part that decides. The model can suggest any number of answers, but it doesn’t know your business, so it can’t tell you which answer is right for you.

Vibe coding vs agentic coding, prompt engineering and AI-assisted coding

• Prompt engineering is getting better answers out of a chat window by writing better questions. You still copy and paste the result.
• AI-assisted coding is a developer writing code with AI suggestions alongside. The developer reads every line.
• Vibe coding is describing what you want and mostly trusting the output. You test the result, not the code.
• Agentic coding is the next step: the AI plans the work, edits many files, runs commands and checks its own results, while you review. That’s closer to how I work now. I haven’t typed a Git command by hand in a year or two, because I tell Claude what I want and it runs them.

Most people are still at the chat-window stage, copying answers out one at a time. The jump from there to letting AI work inside your actual files is the biggest one, and it’s where knowing what not to break starts to matter.

Vibe coding examples

Things a small business owner can realistically vibe code:

• A simple website with your services, prices and a contact form.
• A booking page that sends you an email when someone picks a slot.
• An internal checklist or calculator your team uses every day.
• A landing page for one offer, to test if anyone wants it.

Things I’d be careful with: anything that takes payments, stores health or personal data, or has lots of users logging in. Not because AI can’t write it, but because the decisions behind it cost real money when they’re wrong.

Where vibe coding stops working

Code was the fast part, and vibe coding proved that. What it didn’t solve is the decisions: where your data lives, what happens when something breaks at a bad moment, how it copes when more people use it, and what’s actually secure. AI will make all of those choices for you if you let it. It just won’t tell you which ones were guesses.

That’s usually when people hire a developer, and it’s worth knowing what you’re paying for: not more code, but someone to undo the guesses. I wrote more about that in my guide to vibe coding tools and the decisions they can’t make.