Rewind 2025: When Tesla's ex-AI director gave 'word' that changed work of software engineers
Andrej Karpathy coined "Vibe Coding" to describe AI-assisted programming, where developers rely on natural language prompts. This concept, recognized by Collins Dictionary as Word of the Year, sparks debate about its impact on traditional coding skills and job security in the tech industry.
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This year, or in February 2025 to be precise, Andrej Karpathy, the former director of AI at Tesla and a founding member of OpenAI, gave the technology world a new word -- Vibe Coding.
Karpathy came up with the word to represent how AI can let some programmers "forget that the code even exists" and "give in to the vibes" while making a computer program. The word became an overnight buzzword in Silicon Valley. And as the year ended, UK's Collins Dictionary picked it up as the word of the year. It was one of 10 words on a shortlist to reflect the mood, language and preoccupations of 2025.As to how Andrej Karpathy described the word, here's the definition Karpathy shared on Twitter, "I've never felt this much behind as a programmer.
The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like a skill issue.
There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering.
Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind."
Will Vibe Coding take away tech jobs
Is Vibe Coding and advanced capabilities of AI just the nail in the coffin when it comes to the traditional views of computer programming and software development skills? The debate is ongoing, with strong voices on both sides.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told CNBC earlier this year that app developers can now offload or automate more repetitive tasks, and they can generate new code using Large Language Models (LLMs).
The ability for AI to subsidize an otherwise heavy workload has allowed these companies to build with fewer people." Tan said. “That sounds a little scary, but on the other hand, what that means for founders is that you don’t need a team of 50 or 100 engineers.