Vibe coding: from a joke tweet to an industry in fourteen months.
A word coined as a gag in February 2025 is now a multi-billion-dollar category, a dictionary entry, and the way half of new code gets written.
When Andrej Karpathy described “fully giving in to the vibes” — telling an AI what you want and accepting the code it writes — it read as a joke. By the end of 2025 Collins Dictionary had made it Word of the Year. By this spring the tools market around it was estimated at $4.7 billion and growing at 38% a year: bigger than the entire market for the traditional code editors it’s replacing. Cursor alone went from $1 billion to $2 billion in annualised revenue in roughly three months.
The adoption numbers are no longer interesting because they’re settled: around nine in ten US developers use AI coding tools daily, and GitHub reports roughly 46% of all new code is now AI-generated. The interesting number is who’s writing it — about 63% of vibe-coding users aren’t developers at all. Product managers, founders, marketers, designers. The cost of standing up a working software product has dropped from roughly $200,000 to a few thousand dollars.
The last 10% is the business
Here’s the flip side the pitch decks skip. Security audits keep finding that roughly 45% of AI-generated code samples carry OWASP Top-10 class vulnerabilities; one analysis found one in ten apps from a popular platform shipped with exploitable access-control flaws on real user data. Getting from zero to 90% of an app has never been cheaper. Getting from 90% to 100% — auth, edge cases, payments, the boring parts — is where products succeed or quietly leak.
Even Karpathy has moved on, declaring vibe coding passé and pointing at “agentic engineering”: humans set the architecture and review, agents do the typing. In other words — after one giddy year, the industry rediscovered engineering discipline. We could have told you. We did tell you, repeatedly, about ERP.
Where we stand
We’re enthusiastic vibe coders — for prototypes. It’s how our studio PRTOTYPE.COM gets a clickable concept in front of you in days. But nothing vibe-coded goes to production without review, tests and an owner. Speed for proving the idea; discipline for shipping it. Use both, in that order.
- Vibe coding is real and the market (∼$4.7B, +38%/yr) proves it — dismissing it wastes the prototype-speed advantage.
- ∼46% of new code is AI-generated and ∼63% of users aren’t developers: the cost floor for standing up software has permanently fallen.
- ∼45% of AI code samples carry OWASP Top-10 class flaws. The last 10% — auth, edge cases, payments — is still where products succeed or leak.
- Use vibe coding to prove the idea quickly, then apply engineering discipline before any user sees it. Speed and rigour are sequential, not competing.