What Is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want in plain English and letting an AI model write the code. Andrej Karpathy named it in 2025. It is astonishingly good at getting something working by Friday. It is astonishingly bad at telling you what it just built — which is why a lot of businesses now own a website nobody can safely change.

I have been building on the web for over twenty years, and vibe coding for the last two. I have shipped eight live properties this way. This is a field report, not a warning from a sceptic.

Where the name came from

In early 2025 Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI, described a way of working he called vibe coding: you describe what you want, the model writes it, and you stop reading the code. It was a style of working, not a technology — and nobody sold it to your developer as a tradeoff.

The old way, the vibe way, and what actually works

Traditional development takes weeks to months, costs the most, and the team that built it understands it. Vibe coding takes hours to days, costs the least, and frequently nobody understands it afterwards — when it breaks you start over, and nobody is accountable. Agentic engineering takes days to weeks: agents work against a written spec, tests catch failures first, changes are routine, and a named person is accountable.

The magic is real. Work that used to take a team a quarter can now happen in a weekend. The argument is not about whether vibe coding works. It is about what happens in month six.

What it looks like when it goes wrong

• The form that silently stopped working. Looked perfect, validated, never delivered a single message.
• The redesign that deleted the working version, recoverable only from a previous commit.
• The site nobody can hand over, where changing one page is quoted like a rebuild.
• Credentials shipped to the browser instead of kept on the server.
• Business logic nobody can explain, because the reasoning lived in a closed chat window.

The pattern is not that AI writes bad code. It is that nobody was reading it, and these failures are quiet.

Agentic engineering: the same speed, with someone accountable

In early 2026 Karpathy named the professional successor: agentic engineering. You write a specification first, agents work against it, every change is reviewed, tests run, and the system is watched after launch. Vibe coding raises the floor; agentic engineering protects the ceiling. See the Build Standard and agentic engineering.

How I build

1. Write down what it has to do, before any code.
2. Give the agents context, not just instructions.
3. Review the agent’s plan before it builds.
4. The agents write the code — the genuinely fast part.
5. Read every change. This is the step people skip.
6. Run tests before anything ships.
7. Watch it after launch, because the costly failures are silent.

Should you vibe code your business website?

For a prototype, a test, or an internal tool: yes, absolutely. For the thing that takes payment, holds customer data, or is how people find and contact you: not without someone accountable for it. See the portfolio for sites built this way, or send me your site.