Vibe coding

The term, coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, describes a way of working where you describe what you want, let the model write it, and iterate on the result by feel rather than by reading every line. Tools like Lovable, Bolt, v0, and Replit Agent made it accessible to people who never wrote code professionally.

It is genuinely useful for prototypes, internal tools, and proving an idea in a weekend. The trouble starts when a vibe-coded prototype meets production: no one on the team can explain the auth model, the database has no row-level security, secrets are in the client bundle, there are no tests, and the cost of a bad change is suddenly real.

Vibe coding is not the opposite of engineering — it is a fast first draft. The work of turning that draft into something a business can depend on (auth, data boundaries, tests, evals, observability, cost control) is a separate, well-understood discipline.