Vibe coding
Building software by describing what you want and iterating on what the model produces, rather than writing it line by line.
Also written: vibe coder, vibe coders, vibe-coded.
The term was coined in early 2025 for a way of working that had already become common: describing the thing you want, running what comes back, and steering by result rather than by reading every line.
It is genuinely transformative for the first eighty per cent of a project and genuinely dangerous for the last twenty. The failure mode is not code that does not run — that is obvious and quickly fixed — but code that runs, looks right, and is wrong in a way nobody reads carefully enough to catch. The craft is knowing which parts you are still obliged to understand.