what is vibe coding, really?
everyone's using the word. nobody agrees on what it means. here's our working definition — and why we think it's the most important shift since the spreadsheet.
the term “vibe coding” got coined sometime in early 2025 and immediately became one of those words people argue about more than they define. some people use it to mean “copy-pasting from chatgpt without understanding it.” some people use it to mean “all software development, eventually.” we think both are wrong, and both are interestingly wrong.
here's our working definition: vibe coding is building software by describing what you want, then steering the model toward it, instead of typing every line yourself.
that's it. that's the whole thing.
the part that's new
the new thing isn't that the AI writes code — it's been doing that since 2021. the new thing is that the AI is good enough that your role changes. you're no longer the person assembling the syntax. you're the person deciding what should exist.
that role used to have a name. it was called product manager, or tech lead, or founder. now everyone gets to play that role on every project, including the one-person projects.
the part that's a skill
the thing the discourse keeps missing is that being good at this is a learnable craft. it has techniques. it has reps. it has people who are clearly better at it than other people. the gap between a great vibe coder and a mediocre one is enormous — bigger, probably, than the gap between a great developer and a mediocre one ever was.
here's what the great ones do:
- they describe things precisely, not just “a dashboard.”
- they spot when something's off, even when it compiles.
- they keep going when the model is confidently wrong.
- they have strong opinions about what they want.
- they know when to stop prompting and just fix it themselves.
none of that is “just knowing how to type.” it's closer to editing, or producing, or directing — disciplines where you don't operate the camera but you do decide what gets shot.
the part everyone's scared of
the fear is that this lowers the bar to the point where everything becomes slop. and yeah, sometimes it does. but the bar was already weirdly high in a way that didn't serve anyone. there are thousands of people who never built the thing they wanted to build because they got lost three chapters into a typescript book.
those people are now shipping. some of what they ship is great. some is bad. that's normal.that's how it's always been when a creative tool gets more accessible.
so what now
if you're curious about this — if you've already used cursor or claude or whatever and noticed that you're building things you couldn't before — you're a vibe coder. welcome. the workshop is open 24/7.