Who coined the term 'vibe coding' and what does it describe?
It emerged from Reddit and has no single author — it describes using AI to debug code
Sam Altman coined it to describe OpenAI's internal development methodology
Andrej Karpathy coined it to describe building software by describing what you want in natural language, with AI writing the code
Linus Torvalds coined it to describe open-source collaborative development
Explanation
Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, coined 'vibe coding' in February 2025 to describe a mode of software development where you describe intent to AI and AI writes the code — with the human focusing on what they want rather than how to implement it.