‘Vibe coding’ named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2025 as AI rewrites the rules of software creation

Vibe coding

The phrase that once gave engineers sleepless nights has officially entered the cultural lexicon. Collins Dictionary has crowned “vibe coding” its Word of the Year for 2025 — a term describing the act of building apps and software simply by talking to artificial intelligence instead of manually writing code.

Coined in February by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, “vibe coding” captured the imagination of developers after he urged them to “give in to the vibes” and “forget the code even exists.” The phrase quickly became shorthand for a revolution sweeping Silicon Valley: conversational software development powered entirely by generative AI.

What began as a fringe experiment has rapidly become mainstream. Anyone can now prompt AI tools to “build a meal planner” or “create a fitness tracker” without typing a single line of code. Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai has joined the trend, experimenting with tools like Cursor and Replit to craft his own news aggregator. “It feels so delightful to be a coder in this moment,” he told Bloomberg Tech earlier this year.

The trend is shaking the foundations of the tech industry. Y Combinator’s Garry Tan says ten “vibe coders” can now match the output of a hundred traditional engineers. A quarter of startups in the accelerator’s current batch reportedly rely on AI to write up to 95% of their code. “This is a powerful moment in software,” Tan said, noting that founders are launching products faster, cheaper, and with far smaller teams.

Vibe coding at Big tech

The world’s biggest tech firms are embracing the shift at scale. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed in April that AI now generates nearly 30% of the company’s production code, a figure echoed by Google, where over a quarter of new code now originates from AI systems. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is going even further, predicting that half of Meta’s development will be AI-driven within a year — with some AI models even being designed to build other AI models.

But the transformation comes with unease. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned earlier this year that the demand for software engineers could decline as AI absorbs more of the repetitive workload. “Each developer will do much, much more for a while,” he said. “And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need fewer software engineers.” Companies such as Amazon and Salesforce have already cited AI automation as a factor behind large-scale job cuts.

Still, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang views this moment as an equaliser, not a threat. “There’s a new programming language,” he said at London Tech Week. “It’s called human.”

“Vibe coding” beat out other tech-heavy contenders for Collins’ top honour, including “clanker” (a term for glitchy AI bots), “broligarchy” (used for billionaire tech elites), and “aura farming” (performing online coolness for clout).

Collins’ language director Alex Beecroft called the choice a reflection of how human-computer interaction has evolved. “It captures the moment when speaking to machines became as natural as typing commands,” he said.