Vibe coding

What is vibe coding?

Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want to an AI model and accepting the code it writes, often without reading or fully understanding it. Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder, is credited with coining the term in a February 2025 post. It lets non-engineers build working tools in hours. Developer Simon Willison draws the line at review: code you have tested and can explain is ordinary AI-assisted programming.

Why it matters to a revenue leader

Revenue teams can now build their own dashboards, quoting helpers and CRM scripts without waiting on IT. The speed is real, and so is the risk. A vibe-coded tool that writes to the CRM or handles customer pricing can break without warning, and nobody on the team may know how it works. A tool one seller builds for personal use is a prototype. Once the team depends on it, it needs an owner, testing and the same data rules as any other system.

A sales manager at a fire protection company with 11 sellers vibe codes a small app that turns inspection reports into draft repair quotes. It saves each seller about an hour a week. Three months later a price book change breaks the labor calculation, and quotes go out low for two weeks before anyone notices, because nobody had reviewed the code.