What is Vibe Coding?
The complete 2026 guide.

Vibe coding is the practice of building software primarily by prompting AI tools — describing what you want in natural language and letting the model write, edit and debug the code for you. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025, and within a year it had become the dominant way new founders ship their first product. This guide explains where it came from, the tools that enable it, who's doing it, and the part nobody warned you about: what happens at scale.

Where the term came from

In February 2025, ex-OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy tweeted that he had started "vibe coding" — building software where he barely looked at the code and just kept describing the next feature he wanted. The model would write it. If it broke, he'd describe the bug. The model would fix it. He called it a new kind of programming: flow over correctness, intent over implementation.

The phrase exploded. Within weeks, every indie hacker on X was calling themselves a vibe coder. By mid-2025, AI builders like v0, Lovable and Bolt had built their entire marketing around the vibe.

What "vibe coding" actually means in practice

The defining feature of vibe coding is that the human's role shifts from writing code to directing intent. Instead of typing function addUser(email) { ... }, you type "add a sign-up form that saves users to the database with email verification." The AI produces 200 lines of code in three files. You don't read most of them — you check that the feature works, then move on.

This isn't just "using AI to autocomplete." It's a fundamentally different posture. The codebase is no longer something you understand line-by-line. It's a black box that produces the behaviour you described. You only open it when something breaks — and even then, you usually just describe the bug to the model.

The tools that made it possible

• Cursor — the AI-first code editor. Still feels like an IDE, but you mostly talk to the model in a side panel. Good for engineers who want some control.
• v0 (by Vercel) — describe a UI, get a working Next.js app. Heavy emphasis on visual generation.
• Lovable — full-stack apps from a prompt. Backend, frontend, database, deployed.
• Bolt — similar to Lovable, runs in your browser, ships fast.
• Replit Agent — Replit's full-stack vibe coding mode. Strong on backend.
• Windsurf — IDE-style like Cursor, with agentic execution.
• Claude Code — Anthropic's CLI-based agentic coding tool, popular for refactors.

The ecosystem is moving fast. By the time you read this, two more tools will have launched. The pattern is the same: prompt → working code → ship.

Who is doing it (and why everyone's pretending they aren't)

Vibe coding is now the default for: solo founders shipping MVPs, designers who wanted to build a product but couldn't code, product managers prototyping ideas, students hacking on side projects, and — quietly — engineers at every Series A startup using it to ship faster while telling their CTO they "just used Copilot for autocomplete."

The reason it's slightly taboo to admit is that "I built this entirely with AI" sounds, to some ears, like "I cheated." But the work of knowing what to build, iterating on it, and shipping it to users is the actual job. Whether the keystrokes came from your fingers or a model is increasingly a technicality.

What vibe coding is genuinely great at

The honest answer: most things, most of the time. Specifically:

• Validating an idea fast. A working prototype in a weekend that would have taken three weeks of hand-coding.
• UI work. AI tools generate beautiful, modern UIs faster than most humans can.
• Boilerplate. Auth flows, CRUD forms, API endpoints — solved problems that AI handles cleanly.
• One-off tools. Internal dashboards, automation scripts, throwaway data utilities.
• Learning. Vibe coding is genuinely the fastest way to see code patterns you've never seen before.

What it's quietly bad at — the part nobody mentions

Here's where this guide stops being a hype piece and starts being honest, because we run a company that cleans up vibe-coded apps for a living and we've now looked at hundreds of them.

1. Architectural coherence at scale. A model writes one file at a time. It doesn't keep a mental model of how that file fits into the rest of the system. By feature 30, you have 30 files with subtly inconsistent patterns, duplicated utilities, and contradictory naming conventions. The AI doesn't notice. You don't either, until it's too late.

2. Database design. AI tools default to throwing fields onto tables as features get added. After six months you have tables with 40 columns, no indexes, and JSON blobs hiding what should be normalised relationships. Queries get slow. Migrations get scary.

3. Performance. Vibe-coded apps tend to ship with naive code patterns — fetching the same data five times per page, no caching, N+1 queries everywhere. It works fine for 10 users. It melts at 1,000.

4. Security. Auth gets bolted on. Environment variables get committed. API routes are sometimes unprotected. The AI doesn't know what your threat model is — and you can't tell it, because you don't know either.

5. The "one more feature" problem. You ask the AI to add a button. It rewrites the entire login component. Now login is broken. You ask it to fix login. It rewrites the database. By the third loop, you can't tell what's been changed or what's still working.

So… is vibe coding good or bad?

Both. Vibe coding is the right tool for building, testing, and iterating on an idea fast. It's the wrong tool for running a production app with 10,000 users and a payments system. The transition between those two phases is where most projects die — not from a single bug but from a slow accumulation of architectural debt that eventually makes every new feature take three times as long as the last.

The smart founders are the ones who use vibe coding to get to product-market fit as fast as possible, and then bring in real engineers to refactor the foundation before scaling. That second step is the part most people skip. It's also the part Mendly exists to do.

FAQs

Is vibe coding the same as no-code?

No. No-code tools (Webflow, Bubble, Glide) generate apps without producing readable source code — you're locked into the platform. Vibe coding produces real code in real languages (TypeScript, Python, etc.) that you own and can edit. It's closer to "hand-coding with a faster keyboard" than to no-code.

Will vibe coding replace traditional programming?

For the bottom 70% of programming tasks, it already has. For the architectural, security-critical, and performance-sensitive 30%, humans are still required — and increasingly valuable.

How do I know if my vibe-coded app needs a refactor?

If two of these are true: pages take more than 1 second to load, adding a feature breaks another feature, you've stopped being able to read your own code, your database queries take more than 200ms, your AI tool is in a refactor loop that keeps breaking things. We wrote a full checklist here.

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