What is vibe coding?

Vibe coding is where you chat with an AI Coding Assistant to build software rather than writing it yourself. It’s like when you chat with ChatGPT but since it’s a coding assistant, the result is code.

The term started showing up on Twitter and in developer communities in late 2024 and 2025 as agentic AI coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor became more capable. Instead of writing code line by line, you describe the “vibe” of what you’re trying to accomplish and the AI writes it for you.

Here’s what it looks like in practice. Instead of writing:

def calculate_total(items):
    return sum(item.price * item.quantity for item in items)

You might just say “write a function that calculates the total price of items in a shopping cart” and the AI writes it for you.

The appeal is obvious. You can build things faster by focusing on what you want rather than how to implement it. You can prototype ideas quickly. And you don’t need to remember exact syntax or API details. For people who aren’t software engineers, it’s a complete game changer. You can build real software without years of learning to code.

But there’s a catch. You still need to understand code to review what the AI generates, catch bugs, and debug when things go wrong. Vibe coding works best when you know enough to guide the AI and verify its work. It’s a tool that amplifies what you can do, not a replacement for understanding programming. And that’s especially true for things like security.

I use vibe coding all the time now for boilerplate code, test cases, and initial implementations. It’s genuinely faster for a lot of tasks. But I’m still reading and thinking about every line of code that gets written.