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What is vibe-coding and why it became one of 2025’s big topics

While 2023 was shaped by chatbots and 2024 by the rise of RAG and new models, 2025 introduced a concept that’s capturing the attention of developers worldwide: vibe-coding. The signal is clear: the term already appears in dictionaries like Merriam-Webster and was selected as Word of the Year by Collins, an unusual milestone for such a recent technological trend.

Interest is growing because vibe-coding redefines how software is created by removing one of the biggest historical barriers: the need to write code. In this model, people describe in natural language what they need —“I want an expense-tracking app with charts and alerts”— and the AI generates the application. Conversation replaces code, and the focus shifts back to the business.

From a single tweet to a global phenomenon

The term was coined in February 2025, when Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former Director of AI at Tesla, published a tweet describing “a new kind of programming” where one “leans into the vibe and forgets the code even exists.”

That message captured a reality already unfolding: as large language models matured, thousands of developers and business teams began building products by describing what they wanted instead of programming line by line. What followed was rapid momentum: media, startups, corporations and technical communities embraced the concept, cementing it as the name of a new AI-driven development style.

Today, vibe-coding is no longer a curiosity. It’s a trend transforming processes, shortening cycles and enabling ideas that once lived in PowerPoints to become functional prototypes in minutes.

The power of vibe-coding

If you already know how to program, vibe-coding doesn’t replace your skills —it amplifies them. And if you don’t, it opens an entirely new world of possibilities. That second point is where the true revolution lies.

A few months ago, I got a call from a former colleague in HR who was fascinated with one of these tools. She was developing an app she had envisioned for years and had hired a developer to build it. After months of work she had a functional prototype, but felt it still didn’t reflect what she imagined. Everything changed when she discovered v0, a vibe-coding tool gaining popularity. Suddenly, she was “vibe-coding” her own app. She could generate screens with simple phrases, adjust styles, brainstorm with the AI and iterate freely. For the first time, she had a faithful, semi-functional prototype of her idea.

At Quanam, this kind of experience is increasingly common. Today our Product Managers, Product Owners and dev teams use vibe-coding to quickly bring ideas to life and accelerate MVP definitions, both visually and functionally.

One example is Menthor, a microlearning and skill-tracking product conceived and developed by Quanam’s PM team in a notably accelerated process thanks to the Bolt platform. The reduction in time and cost, the ability to experiment and validate features, the suggestions generated by the tool itself and the possibility of offering a real user experience in very little time were all decisive. It also democratized product understanding across development, Marketing and UX/UI.

Another, more technical case comes from our team in the USA, which in just four months developed nearly from scratch a billing system for a major public utilities company. Although a previous system existed in Perl and the team lacked expertise in that language, tools like Cursor enabled them to quickly understand critical components and use that knowledge to design a modern new architecture. This accelerated development, reduced costs and expanded the team’s technical capabilities.

The new developer stack: assistants, intelligent IDEs and a dose of FOMO

In the dev world, vibe-coding is already part of daily work. Tools like Cursor, extensions like Copilot, and CLIs like Claude Code and Gemini are among the most widely used.

The combination of new models, changing pricing and rapidly evolving features creates a particular phenomenon: a kind of FOMO about the possibility that a better tool combination might exist. This fuels a continuous search for the ideal setup.

Strategic capability

Nine months after that initial tweet, the concept of vibe-coding has evolved into concrete applications, methodologies and a new way of thinking about development, with conversation with AI at the center. What began as a novelty has become a daily practice for both developers seeking speed and business profiles who want to materialize ideas without knowing how to code.

At the intersection of vision and execution, between idea and prototype, vibe-coding is moving beyond a trendy term to become a strategic capability for developers and organizations.

If you’re looking to accelerate ideas or products with AI, let’s talk!
Kenji Nakasone, Lead AI Innovation Engineer at Quanam

Sources

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/vibe-coding
[2] https://blog.collinsdictionary.com/language-lovers/collins-word-of-the-year-2025-ai-meets-authenticity-as-society-shifts/
[3] https://karpathy.ai/
[4] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
[5] https://v0.app/
[6] https://bolt.new/
[7] https://cursor.com/agents