"Vibe Coding" is Collins' Dictionary word of the year

Every dictionary going has a word of the year now, and if you want an app to keep track of them all but don't have any programming skills, Collins' selection for 2025 might help: "Vibe Coding."

Tired of wrestling with syntax? Just go with the vibes. That's the essence of vibe coding, Collins' Word of the Year 2025, a term that captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology. Coined by AI pioneer Andrej Karpathy, vibe coding refers to the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to write computer code. Basically, telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself. It's programming by vibes, not variables. While tech experts debate whether it's revolutionary or reckless, the term has resonated far beyond Silicon Valley, speaking to a broader cultural shift towards AI-assisted everything in everyday life.

Here's Collins' definition: "the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code."

This is a poor definition, as vibe coding is more than that. Specifically, the resulting LLM-generated code must be functional, so the prompter is not required to understand or edit it (or even know that code exists). This is really the entire point of calling it "vibe" coding! Here's Karpathy's original post:

Previously:
• Oxford Dictionaries' crowns 'toxic' as its 2018 word of the year
• 'Single-use' edges out 'VAR,' 'floss,' 'gammon,' and 'plogging' as this dictionary's word of the year
• Is 'Goblin Mode' really the Word of the Year, or are we being gaslighted?
• 'Pandemic' is the Dictionary.com word of the year.
• 'Gaslighting' isn't Merriam-Webster's 2022 word of the year, darling, you're just confused
• GIF is word of the year
• The Merriam-Webster dictionary's word of the year is…
• Brain Rot is Oxford's word of the year