vibe coding

The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 to describe a way of working where you "fully give in to the vibes" and stop reading the diffs. It spread because it named something real: for a large class of software, the generated result is good enough that reading it adds nothing.

The failure mode is specific rather than general. Vibe coding does not break because models write bad code. It breaks because nobody is checking, and the volume of unchecked code grows faster than anyone's ability to understand it later. The first prompt is fine. The tenth is built on nine prompts nobody read.

This is why verification is the natural complement to vibe coding rather than its opposite. If you are not going to read the code, something else has to establish that it works — a typecheck, a test suite, a production build, a smoke test. Not because the machine is smarter than you, but because it is tireless and you have already decided not to look.

The honest limit: verification proves an application runs, not that it is correct, secure, or the one you meant. Vibe coding with verification is a much better bet than vibe coding without it, and neither is a licence to skip reading anything that touches money or personal data.