Glossary · vibe-coding
Vibe coding
Definition
A development style where a human describes intent in natural language and an AI agent implements, tests, and iterates without the human writing code line-by-line. Coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. The human reviews diffs, runs the result, and steers the next iteration: closer to direction than authorship. Useful for prototypes; risky for production without gating.
Context
Vibe coding works well in throwaway environments: prototypes, scripts, side projects, sandbox experiments. It becomes risky when the same loose loop touches real credentials, production data, or shared infrastructure. The agent that hallucinated an unsafe rm command can now run it. Agent workstations make vibe coding safer by adding a passkey gate at the boundary: the human still vibes, but privileged actions pause until the human explicitly approves them.
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