Vibe coding
Also called obituary
What we briefly called just… talking to an AI until the app worked, without really reading the code.
Think of it like
Cooking without measuring — totally fine for a snack, faintly terrifying for a wedding cake.
Example
In 2024, “I vibe-coded a weekend app” meant you prompted your way to something that ran and shipped it.
How it actually works
Filed as history: what people meant in 2024–25, and why it grew up. The term peaked in early 2025, then split — the throwaway-prototype meaning stuck around as a joke, while the actual practice matured into agentic coding with tests, reviews, and specs. The vibes, it turned out, needed guardrails.
For product teams
The 2024 name for prompt-until-it-works prototyping — now matured into agentic coding with guardrails.
For engineers
Prompt-driven codegen without close review; superseded by agent workflows with tests and specs.
Related
- Agents — Folded into “agentic coding.”
- Prompt engineering — The reflex it named lives on inside prompt engineering.
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