Vibe coding

Vibe coding is the 2024-2026 idiom for building software primarily by describing intent to an AI coding assistant — coding by feel and outcome rather than line-by-line authorship.

Coined informally in 2024 and now widely used by 2026, vibe coding describes the practice of building software by iteratively prompting an AI (Cursor, Lovable, v0, Bolt, Claude Code) toward a working result without writing most of the code yourself. The vibe coder describes intent, evaluates output, refines prompts, and accepts diffs. The term is sometimes pejorative ("vibes-based, not engineering") and sometimes celebratory ("the next abstraction"); both readings have merit. Best results in 2026 come from vibe coders who still read the diffs, run the tests, and understand what got changed.

When to use vibe coding

• Rapid prototyping.
• Single-developer projects.
• Idea validation before committing engineering resource.

Common mistakes

• Shipping vibe-coded output to production without reading it.
• Skipping tests because the AI "already verified" — it didn't.

FAQ

Related terms

• AI agent — An AI agent is a system where a language model autonomously plans and executes a sequence of tool calls to accomplish a goal.
• Code completion (AI) — AI code completion is the inline suggestion of code as a developer types — the autocomplete category dominated by Cursor Tab, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Tabnine, and Codeium in 2026.
• Prompt engineering — Prompt engineering is the practice of designing input text that reliably steers a large language model toward a specific output.

Last updated: 2026-06-01. Raw markdown: https://promtable.com/glossary/vibe-coding.md.