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What Vibe Coding Actually Is

Vibe Coder 101 · Phase 1: Foundations · Stage 1 of 38 · about 10 min · Weekend track

Imagine you want a birthday cake. You could learn to bake — measuring flour, watching the oven, all of it. Or you could describe the cake you want to a baker, taste what comes out, and say "less sweet, more chocolate" until it is right.

Vibe coding is the second one, for software. You describe what you want in ordinary English. An AI writes the actual code. You look at what it made, decide if it is right, and ask for changes.

You are the director. The AI is the crew.

Where the name came from

The phrase was coined in February 2025 by Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher, describing a way of building where you lean on the model for the details instead of typing every line yourself. It caught on fast — Collins English Dictionary picked "vibe coding" as its Word of the Year for 2025.

So it is a genuinely new way of working, but not a magic one. Which brings us to the important part.

What it is — and what it is not

It is not no-code. No-code tools hide the code completely behind buttons and menus. Vibe coding still produces real code — you just generate far more of it than you type. The code is right there, and you can read and change it.

It is not "the code doesn't matter." The code still runs. It can still have bugs, still be slow, still have security holes. An AI writing it does not change any of that.

It is not hands-off. You are still responsible for whether the thing actually works. The AI is fast and confident — and confidently wrong sometimes. Your job is to check.

What to expect, honestly

Here is what surprises most people in their first week:

  • The first version usually works. That part really is as good as it sounds.
  • The fifth change often breaks something. As your app grows, the AI has more to keep track of, and it starts forgetting corners of it.
  • It will never say "I don't know." If it cannot do what you asked, it will often produce something that looks right instead. This is the single biggest thing to watch for.
  • You will learn to read code anyway. Not to write it from scratch — to check it. That turns out to be the real skill.

Who this course is for

Someone who has never written a line of code and wants to build a real, working app. No computer science background needed. No math. If you can describe what you want clearly, you can do this.

Phase 1 — the five stages including this one — is designed to fit in a weekend. By the end of it you will have built something, run it on your own machine, broken it, and fixed it. That last part matters more than it sounds.

Your turn

Nothing to build yet. Just one thing to decide: what small thing do you want to make?

Keep it tiny. A timer. A list of your favorite films. A page that tells you what to cook based on what is in your fridge. Small enough that you could describe it in two sentences — that is the right size for a first project.

Write it down. You will use it in the next stage.