Why Does Vibe Coding Take the Crown for Word of the Year?

When Collins Dictionary announces its Word of the Year, it usually signifies the trend of the year. In 2023, 'Artificial Intelligence' took the crown, a year after the introduction of Sam Altman’s ChatGPT.

The following year in 2024 ‘brat’ took the top spot, meaning a confident, hedonistic attitude popularised by Gen Z culture and, of course, Charli XCX’s record-breaking album.

When the 2025 word of the year was revealed in September, the announcement felt almost inevitable: vibe coding.

According to Collins, vibe coding is “the artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist the writing of computer code”. Basically, it is coding, but with conversation.

The term itself was coined by Andrej Karpathy - known for his work at Tesla and as a founding OpenAI engineer - who summed it up as a mode of development where you “forget that code even exists”.

For Collins, the rise of vibe coding wasn’t just a bit of fun in the tech industry, their lexicographers track billions of words across news, social media and online content in what they call the Collins Corpus.

Throughout 2025, they saw the term explode in usage, enough to crown it the Word of the Year. 

They characterised it as a sign of how deeply AI is woven into everyday language, just a few years after its recognition, and how quickly vocabulary evolves to keep up with shifting technology and culture.

Vibe coding in the C-suite

The idea of vibe coding didn’t just stay in tech teams. Business leaders, from major tech CEOs to fintech founders, were embracing AI-assisted coding in practical, surprising and sometimes game changing ways.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, spoke openly about how vibe coding has “made coding so much more enjoyable”.

In an interview in September with The Verge, he said: “The power of the future you’re going to be able to create on the web, we haven’t given that power to developers in 25 years.”

Sundar said what used to require specialised engineering skills can now be tackled by people across teams, regardless of their technical background.

In his view, vibe coding expands who gets to build software and speeds up the entire process.

Speaking in a Google for Developers podcast interview in November, the CEO even compares the moment to the early days of blogging: “You know, suddenly blogs appeared, many more people became writers, if you will, and what YouTube did, many more people became creators.”

Prototyping their own ideas

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski also shared that he’s been using vibe coding tools to prototype product ideas himself, sometimes in even 20 minutes.

What would’ve previously taken a meeting with the tech team and then two weeks of them formulating a prototype, can be done from his desk.

“Rather than disrupting my poor engineers and product people with what is half good ideas and half bad ideas, now I can test it myself,” Sebastian told the Sourcery podcast.

He argues that this kind of agility helps companies innovate faster and more efficiently, avoiding mix ups when the team’s prototypes don’t align with leadership vision.

The power of vibe coding

Vibe coding eliminates part of the AI-hierarchy in companies, enabling people without formal training from marketing teams to HR members to build tools and prototypes. 

This opens up so many opportunities for faster innovation and a more inclusive creative process.

As Klarna’s CEO’s experience shows, what once took weeks can now take minutes. This level of speed changes how ideas are tested, validated or discarded, opening up opportunities in digital transformation.

If natural language becomes the main “coding language”, the role of the developer may shift: less hand-coding, more specifying intents, reviewing outputs and ensuring quality. Executives, product leads or area specialists may become more hands on in building software.