Patents on the soles of your shoes...: December 2025

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

Terminology – WOTTIES 2025 – Collins Dictionary “vibe coding” Word of the Year

Each year, the major English language dictionaries publish The Words of the Year (WOTY, plural WOTTIES). A list of terms, and the winner of them all, are selected by a committee of terminologists, often backed by the number of times the term(s) were searched online, and/or crowdsourced votes.

Collins Dictionary selected “vibe coding” as the 2025 Word of the Year winner. A term first used on the social media platform X, on February 2, 2025, by Andrej Karpathy, former Director of AI at Tesla and founding engineer at OpenAI. In the X post, Karpathy described how easy it was to use AI-assisted programming tools, such as Cursor Composer and Claude Sonnet, designed to code and debug upon natural language prompting. He described how the tools were currently so good at executing his prompts that he could “give in to the vibes” (go with the flow) of coding, while “just forgetting that the code even exists”. In other words, he could use AI tools to do the computer programming, without writing and reading the unfolding code, or even attempting to debug it. A new jouissance, indeed!

By implication, according to Cress (2025) at the BBC, even if Karpathy's post on vibe coding addressed insiders, his X post also suggested that anyone could at least program a simple app, without any prior coding knowledge. All the user would have to do is request the program's features and functions. The example Karpathy provided for a weekend website construction project was that he could just ask the AI tool to "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half ", without even having to find the code that would execute such a change to the website's functional appearance.

In turn, Collins defined the term “vibe coding” as "the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code.” To illustrate the Dictionary's winning 2025 Word of the Year, Collins also posted the below animated GIF.