What is Vibe Coding? Complete 2026 Guide

What is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is a software development approach where you describe what you want in natural language, and AI generates the code for you. Instead of writing code line by line, you "vibe" with an AI assistant, explaining your vision and iterating through conversation.

The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI director, in early 2025:

"There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists."

In practice, it means building applications by prompting AI tools rather than manually writing code. You might say "build me a landing page with a hero section and pricing table" and the AI generates a complete, functional page.

How Vibe Coding Actually Works

A typical vibe coding session looks something like this:

1. Describe your idea: "I want to build a SaaS that lets users track their daily habits"
2. AI generates code: The tool creates a full application structure, database schema, UI components
3. Iterate through conversation: "Make the dashboard show weekly trends" or "Add a dark mode toggle"
4. Accept changes: Review and accept the AI's modifications
5. Repeat: Keep refining until it matches your vision

The magic is that you rarely (or never) look at the actual code. You interact entirely through natural language, treating the AI like a very fast developer who can implement changes in seconds.

Popular Vibe Coding Tools

Several tools have emerged as leaders in the vibe coding space. Each has different strengths:

What Vibe Coding is Good For

Vibe coding excels in certain scenarios:

• Rapid prototyping: Going from idea to working demo in hours instead of weeks
• MVPs and proof of concepts: Testing whether an idea has legs before investing heavily
• Internal tools: Building admin dashboards, data viewers, and utilities
• Learning: Understanding how applications are structured by seeing AI-generated examples
• Non-technical founders: Getting a working product without a technical co-founder

For these use cases, vibe coding is genuinely revolutionary. Things that used to require hiring a developer or spending months learning to code can now be done in an afternoon.

The Problems with Vibe Coding

Here's where things get complicated. The same approach that makes vibe coding fast also creates significant risks:

Security Vulnerabilities

AI models don't understand security requirements. They write code that works, not code that's safe. Common issues include exposed API keys, missing authentication, SQL injection vulnerabilities, and misconfigured database permissions. We cover the most common problems in detail in our post on 5 security holes found in every vibe-coded app.

The "90% Done" Problem

Vibe-coded apps often feel 90% complete very quickly. The problem is that last 10% (error handling, edge cases, security, performance) is where most of the actual work lives. And it's exactly the work AI is worst at.

Technical Debt

AI-generated code tends to be verbose, duplicative, and hard to maintain. Studies show AI code creates 4x more duplication than human-written code. Future changes become increasingly difficult.

Scaling Issues

Vibe-coded apps often work fine with 10 users but fall apart at 1,000. The AI optimises for "it works" not "it scales." Database queries that are fine at small scale become bottlenecks.

The Gap Between Prototype and Production

This is the core tension of vibe coding. You can build something impressive very quickly, but getting it ready for real users is a different challenge entirely.

Production-ready software needs:

• Security audits and vulnerability fixes
• Proper error handling and logging
• Performance optimisation
• Testing (unit, integration, end-to-end)
• CI/CD pipelines for reliable deployments
• Monitoring and alerting
• Documentation
• Compliance considerations (GDPR, etc.)

These aren't things you can easily "vibe" into existence. They require systematic engineering work, exactly the kind of work vibe coding is designed to skip.

Should You Use Vibe Coding?

The honest answer: it depends on what you're building and who will use it.

Great for:

• Prototypes and demos
• Internal tools with trusted users
• Personal projects
• Validating ideas before investing in proper development

Risky for:

• Anything handling sensitive user data
• Financial applications
• Healthcare or legal software
• Products you plan to scale

The middle ground that works for many founders: use vibe coding to build your MVP fast, then bring in experienced engineers to audit, secure, and production-harden before launch.

The Future of Vibe Coding

Vibe coding isn't going away. The tools will improve. Security will get better (though probably not as fast as we'd like). More guardrails will be added.

But the fundamental tension will remain: speed versus safety, convenience versus reliability. For the foreseeable future, there will always be a gap between what AI can generate and what production software requires.

The smart approach is to embrace vibe coding for what it's good at (rapid iteration, prototyping, exploration) while recognising its limitations and planning accordingly.