Vibe coding is not a programming technique. It's an organizational event dressed up as one. When GitHub Copilot launched in 2021, the narrative was "AI as pair programmer." When ChatGPT arrived, it shifted to "AI as junior developer." By the time Cursor and Windsurf and Devin entered the picture, the goalposts had moved so far that we stopped noticing where they used to be.The term itself — coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 — describes writing software by describing what you want and iterating on AI output until it looks right. No architecture upfront. No deep understanding of the internals. Just prompt, review, adjust, ship. The name is almost deliberately casual. Vibe. As if the whole thing is low-stakes.