2025 was the year that trying fell out of favor. Why put in a genuine, earnest effort when you can have AI do just enough for you to offer a phone-it-in level of output? Enter: vibes, the solution that requires the lowest amount of personal investment, understanding, or care.

The vibe trend was underway long before the calendar turned over to 2025. In the post-pandemic era, the world has grown increasingly disconnected from anything that grounds us in a collective sense of reality. But things really started getting turned up a notch as AI tools and AI agents have become more readily available.

You could pin the turning point of this trend to OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy’s introduction of the term “vibe coding,” which dropped in February. “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,” he wrote on X. I ‘Accept All’ always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it.”

Karpathy was far from the only person to go full vibes when it comes to coding (though when he did release a real project this year, he admitted to coding the whole thing by hand). Executives, in particular, really took to the idea. Ones like Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski revealed that despite having little real experience in software development, he now mocks up features via vibe coding and asks his engineers to make it work. Google CEO Sundar Pichai also started churning out his own AI-generated code and called the experience “delightful.”

Vibe coding made such an impact that it became Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year. But it really only starts to capture just how much everyone surrendered to the vibes, guided by the North Star of “good enough.” The vibes truly invaded everything.

Have an essay to finish? Vibe writing can get it done—not well, mind you, but done nonetheless. AI writing detection is notoriously spotty, but TurnItIn, the go-to plagiarism detector for educators, estimates that about one-in-five college papers submitted last year had signs of AI-generated text in them. That lines up with a survey conducted by Inside Higher Ed, which found that about 20% of students self-reported using AI to write essays for them. It wasn’t just college kids tapping into the vibes, either. Microsoft went so far as to co-opt the term “vibe writing” to describe what its AI assistant, Copilot, offered to Microsoft Word users.

OpenAI perhaps stretched the vibes as far as they could go. When the company introduced its browser, ChatGPT Atlas, it showed how its built-in AI Agent could tackle all kinds of tasks for you. Give it your grocery order and watch it (kinda slowly) add all your items into your Instacart basket. Have it create a spreadsheet for you in the background as you surf the web. The company called it “vibe lifing,” suggesting you could just hand over your daily tasks to AI and let it handle them for you. Yes, the agent may misunderstand or hallucinate and order 4,000 pounds of meat for you when you ask for some hamburger patties, but at least you won’t have to do it yourself.

And as for all of these companies offering you the opportunity to ride the vibes, to throw your tasks to the bots, and let whatever comes of it just be? They’re all staying afloat off of vibe revenue and vibe valuations. Sure, they don’t make any money right now. And sure, they’re burning through billions of dollars every quarter, making massive commitments to building out data centers on the promise that if they just have enough processing power, they’ll crack the code of making money. But until then, they’re completing massive investment rounds that price the companies at significantly higher valuations than they’ve shown any indication of reaching, all based on vibes.

Of course, throwing caution to the wind and tasks to AI doesn’t work for everyone. In fact, it doesn’t work for most people. Remember, it’s the executives who love vibe coding and the idea of axing their staff to replace them with AI. For the rest of us, the vibes are bad.

As the economy has ground to a standstill, with most employers freezing hiring and pulling up the ladder on would-be entry-level employees, there has been one niche that has cropped up: the people tasked with making the vibe-made AI outputs suck less. Software engineers are being brought into companies that went all-in on AI coding to fix the many problems that vibe coding has caused. A survey found that about one in three engineers say they actually spend more time fixing AI-generated code than they would have spent writing the code by hand.

Similar trends abound elsewhere, as humans have picked up roles making AI-generated writing sound human or fixing the issues caused by AI image generation models that regularly make mistakes due to their inability to actually think. The vibes are producing more slop than ever. Most people who aren’t already in a position to coast on the comfort of fat paychecks are stuck holding the mops, cleaning up the mess so that others can hold up the work and boast about just how capable AI is. If this is the future, it’s not the vibe.