Vibe coding is a way of programming where an AI tool (typically inside an editor like Cursor or GitHub Copilot, or a web tool like v0, Replit or Lovable) generates source code from a natural-language prompt. The term was popularized in early 2025 by Andrej Karpathy - it describes a state where a person "feels out" and tests the code rather than understanding it in detail.
The result is real software: files, dependencies, database migrations, a backend and a frontend. It has to be deployed to a server, secured, backed up and maintained going forward - and if the AI generates a bug or a security hole, it's still primarily a person who has to find and fix it.
Vibe coding is a good fit for one-off scripts, prototypes and experiments. For a business system meant to run for years and survive turnover on the team, the risk is higher - nobody on the team may know the generated code well enough to safely change it.
Related: No-code vs. vibe coding: what's the difference, Why a prototype never becomes a business system, AI will write your app. But who's going to fix it?.