Engineers’ biggest ‘headache’ is now Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2025
The term that sent shivers down programmers’ spines just months ago has become Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025: “vibe coding.” It describes something once unthinkable—building apps and websites by chatting with AI instead of writing code line by painstaking line. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase in February, urging developers to “give in to the vibes” and “forget the code even exists.” Collins picked it after usage exploded across tech circles and beyond.Anyone can now spin up basic software by telling AI what they want: “Build me a meal planner” or “Create a fitness tracker.” Even Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai is dabbling, using tools like Cursor and Replit to build a custom news aggregator. “It feels so delightful to be a coder in this moment,” he told Bloomberg Tech in June, his enthusiasm barely contained.The shift is rewriting Silicon Valley’s rules. Y Combinator chief Garry Tan puts it bluntly: 10 vibe coders can now match the output of 100 traditional engineers. His accelerator’s numbers back it up—a quarter of current startups let AI write 95% of their code. Where founders once needed armies of engineers and mountains of venture capital, they’re now launching with lean teams and AI doing the heavy lifting. “That’s such a powerful moment in software,” Tan told CNBC.
The numbers tell a startling story about AI’s takeover
But here’s where it gets serious. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dropped a bombshell in April: AI now writes up to 30% of the company’s code, and that figure keeps climbing. At Google, Pichai revealed in October that more than a quarter of new code springs from AI, not human fingers on keyboards. These aren’t experimental side projects—this is production code running services used by billions.Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is betting even bigger. He predicts half of his company’s development will be AI-driven within a year, with the company building AI models specifically designed to develop other AI models. The tech giants aren’t just using AI as a helper—they’re fundamentally rewiring how software gets made.Not everyone’s celebrating. OpenAI’s Sam Altman warned in March that demand for software engineers could eventually dip as AI handles more grunt work. Each developer will simply “do much, much more for a while,” he said, before adding the stark reality: “And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers.”The shift is already visible in corporate cuts. Companies from Amazon to Salesforce have cited AI when slashing thousands of jobs. Still, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argues AI is the “great equalizer,” turning natural language into a new programming tool. “There’s a new programming language,” he told London Tech Week. “It’s called ‘human.'”“Vibe coding” beat out other tech-flavored contenders including “clanker”—slang for frustrating AI bots—”broligarchy” for tech billionaires wielding political power, and “aura farming” for performing coolness on camera.Collins’ Alex Beecroft called it a snapshot of “how language is evolving alongside technology,” marking the moment when talking to machines became as natural as typing commands.
