A year ago, Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe coding” to describe a gleefully reckless way of programming: you prompt, hand the keyboard to an AI, accept everything it spits out, don’t read the diffs, iterate by pasting error messages back in. It was a great label for a real thing - building quick prototypes or MVPs on pure AI autopilot. The problem is that “vibe coding” has become a suitcase term. People now use it to describe everything from a weekend hack to a disciplined engineering workflow where AI agents handle implementation under human oversight. These are fundamentally different activities, and conflating them is causing real confusion - and real damage. What vibe coding actually is Vibe coding means going with the vibes and not reviewing the code . That’s the defining characteristic. You prompt, you accept, you run it, you see if it works. If it doesn’t, you paste the error back and try again. You keep prompting. The human is a prompt DJ, not an engineer.…