What Is Vibe Coding? The Developer Workflow Taking Over in 2026

What Is Vibe Coding? The Developer Workflow Taking Over in 2026 If you've been anywhere near developer Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit in the past year, you've heard the term "vibe coding." People use it casually — "I just vibe coded this whole app in an afternoon" — like it's obvious what that means. It's not always obvious. And the definition matters, because vibe coding isn't just a meme. It's a legitimate shift in how software gets built. This article breaks down what vibe coding actually is, why developers are adopting it so fast, the tools that make it work, and what the workflow looks like in practice. What Is Vibe Coding? Vibe coding is a development approach where you describe what you want in natural language and rely on an AI coding assistant to generate, refine, and debug the actual code. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. His original framing: you "fully give in to the vibes," stop reading code carefully, and instead describe the desired behavior and let the