Vibe coder
Also known as: vibe engineer, vibe coding practitioner
Andrej Karpathy coined 'vibe coding' in February 2025 to describe a mode of software development where you lean fully into AI tools and let them write most of the code, focusing your energy on describing what you want and reviewing what comes back. The term caught on fast, partly because it resonated with a lot of what builders were already doing informally.
As a role identity, vibe coder describes someone who has embraced this workflow as their primary mode of building. It overlaps heavily with full-stack builder, but carries a connotation of working fast and iteratively, shipping functional prototypes quickly rather than focusing on code quality at every step. Non-technical founders who ship their own MVPs (minimum viable products) using tools like Cursor or Lovable sometimes use it as a self-description.
The term is polarizing. Critics argue it encourages shipping brittle code without understanding what it does, which creates real problems at scale. Supporters argue the productivity gains are too large to ignore and that reviewing AI output is itself a learnable skill. In practice, the most effective vibe coders combine creative product instincts with enough technical literacy to catch problematic patterns in generated code before they cause downstream issues.