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What Does 'Vibe Coding' Mean? The New AI-Enabled Programming Trend Explained
It's 2025 and coding has entered its "just vibes" era. No more squinting at semicolons or manually debugging a rogue command chain, now you just tell an AI what you want and pray it doesn’t hallucinate a function into another dimension.
This is "vibe coding," a term used to describe programmers who generate code using AI tools instead of typing it out themselves.
It's fast, it's chaotic, and it's already taking over. But as AI writes more code, one question lingers, "What happens when the vibes turn sour?"
Here's a recap of the hottest new trend and slang term in Silicon Valley and how it became the subject of memes.
Where Did The Term 'Vibe Coding' Originate?
The term "vibe coding" was coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy on February 2nd, 2025, in a post on X / Twitter.
He described it as a "new kind of coding" where he barely touches the keyboard, instead using AI coding assistants like Cursor Composer via voice command. His workflow? "I just see things, say things, run things, and copy-paste things, and it mostly works."
Essentially, vibe coding refers to programmers outsourcing much of their work to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, shifting their role from writing code to prompting, testing and debugging AI-generated outputs.
The phrase quickly took off in February and March 2025 among people convinced that if a major tech player like Karpathy was doing something, they should follow suit.
How Did People React To The Notion Of 'Vibe Coding'?
Many people seemed to instantly love the term "vibe coding," as it just sounded cool. Within days of Karpathy’s post, memes flooded X and Reddit, with programmers sharing memes and jokes about both programmers and tech-inept people vibe coding.
Then came the horror stories. Reports of AI-generated spaghetti code began making the rounds online. Vibe coded software, when created at will and unchecked was bloated, disorganized and impossible to debug.
Reports emerged that over 25 percent of the Winter 2025 Y Combinator batch relied on AI for 95 percent of their code, and professors complained about students who couldn’t explain their own projects.
Vibe coding had suddenly gone from an off-hand tweet to an industry-wide ethical dilemma, but tech folks were inclined to let it slide in the name of progress.
What's With Jokes About 'Vibe Debugging'?
A prominent meme in the early days of this new AI-enabled style of programming was how easy it is to "vibe code," but how hard it is to "vibe debug."
Several internet users shared memes and jokes about how they deal with complicated buggy text generated by AI, with the options ranging from saying, "Pls fix," to dealing with the harrowing task hands-on.
What Are Some More Vibe Coding Memes?
For the full history of Vibe Coding, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.
