If 2024 was the year of Brat and Brain Rot, then 2025 belongs to Vibe Coding – the newly crowned Collins English Dictionary Word of the Year. The phrase captures something essential about where we are with technology: the moment we stopped fighting the machine and started vibing with it.

Coined by AI pioneer Andrej Karpathy, vibe coding describes the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to write computer code – essentially, telling a machine what you want instead of painstakingly programming it yourself. It’s coding by intuition, not instruction. “In February 2025, Karpathy coined the term vibe coding to describe how AI tools allow hobbyists to construct apps and websites, just by typing prompts,” explains Andrej’s personal Wikipedia page.

Our new morning routine includes caffeine, curiosity, and the Collins Word of the Year.

What Is Vibe Coding?

As Collins Dictionary explains in its official statement:

“‘Vibe coding’, an emerging software development that turns natural language into computer code using AI, has been named Collins’ Word of the Year 2025. The term was popularised by Andrej Karpathy (more on him later) former Director of AI at Tesla and founding engineer at OpenAI, to describe how AI enables creative output while he could ‘forget that the code even exists.’”

Programming by vibes, not variables. The new lexicon of the AI era has arrived.

It’s a definition that speaks not just to programmers, but to anyone using AI tools in daily life – from ChatGPT to design assistants and automation apps. Vibe coding reflects a wider cultural shift towards conversational computing: where intuition and language replace technical know-how, and creativity becomes a form of collaboration with algorithms.

But while vibe coding takes the top spot, the 2025 shortlist is a fascinating snapshot of how deeply technology now shapes our vocabulary – and, by extension, our worldview.

Collins Word of the Year 2025 runners-up:

• Clanker – a derogatory term for a computer, robot, or AI system.

• Biohacking – the act of altering the body’s natural processes to enhance health or longevity.

• Broligarchy – a small clique of ultra-wealthy men wielding political influence.

• Taskmasking – pretending to be productive in the workplace (while probably scrolling).

• Coolcation – escaping to cooler climates to holiday sustainably.

• Glaze – to overpraise or flatter someone online.

• Henry – “high earner, not rich yet,” describing the financially stretched upper-middle class.

• Micro-retirement – taking short breaks between jobs to pursue passion projects.

Taken together, this year’s list reads like a digital diary of modern life – equal parts work, wellness, and web culture. Vibe Coding may sound playful, but it perfectly sums up where humanity and technology meet: in the space where logic ends and vibes begin.

Who Is Andrej Karpathy?

Before he coined the term vibe coding, Andrej Karpathy had already built a reputation as one of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence. The Slovak-Canadian computer scientist, born in Bratislava in 1986, is best known for shaping the future of self-driving cars as Director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, and as a co-founder of OpenAI, where he helped pioneer breakthroughs in deep learning and computer vision.

After moving to Toronto at age 15, Karpathy’s academic path reads: dual degrees in Computer Science and Physics from the University of Toronto, a master’s from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD at Stanford University under renowned AI researcher Fei-Fei Li. His doctoral work explored the crossover between natural language processing and computer vision – essentially teaching machines to see and describe the world the way humans do.

But long before the AI labs, Karpathy was already a creator. In the mid-2000s, he ran a YouTube channel called badmephisto, posting Rubik’s Cube tutorials that would later be used by world-class speedcubers like Feliks Zemdegs. (The channel still racks up millions of views.)