The Vibe Coding Glossary

The Vibe Coding Glossary

Vibe coding

Building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI write the code, while you stay in charge of direction and taste. The term was popularized by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 and has since become the umbrella name for this whole way of building.

Prompt

The instruction you give an AI builder — a sentence, a paragraph, or a longer brief describing what you want built or changed.

Agent

An AI system that doesn't just answer a question but takes actions on your behalf — writing files, running commands, checking its own work — often across several steps without you approving each one individually.

Context window

How much information an AI can "hold in mind" at once during a conversation, including your earlier messages and the code it's already written. Long, wandering conversations can eventually push earlier details out of view.

Token

The basic unit AI models process text in — roughly a word or part of a word. Most AI builders also use "credits" or "tokens" as a usage/billing measure, which is a different, tool-specific meaning worth not confusing with the technical one.

LLM (Large Language Model)

The type of AI model — like the ones powering ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — that most AI coding tools are built on top of.

Full-stack

An app that has both a frontend (what users see and click) and a backend (where data is stored and processed) working together.

Frontend / Backend

The frontend is the visual, interactive part of an app — buttons, pages, layout. The backend is the part users don't see: where data lives and business logic runs.

Database

Where an app stores information that needs to persist — accounts, posts, orders. Most modern AI builders use Postgres, often via Supabase.

API

A defined way for two pieces of software to talk to each other — for example, your app asking a payment provider to charge a card.

Deploy / Publish

Making your app live on the internet at a real, working address, instead of just visible in a private preview.

Custom domain

Your own web address (like yoursite.com) pointed at your published app, instead of the default address your builder gives you.

Repository (repo)

The full set of files that make up your project, usually tracked with version control (most often Git) so changes over time are recorded.

Component

A reusable piece of a user interface — a button, a card, a nav bar — that can be used in multiple places in an app.

Hallucination

When an AI confidently states something incorrect — a made-up API, a feature that doesn't exist. Worth double-checking anything that seems oddly specific and unfamiliar.

Iteration

The back-and-forth loop of building something, looking at the result, and refining it — the core working rhythm of vibe coding.

WebContainer

The browser-based technology (used by tools like Bolt.new) that runs a real code environment — installing packages, running servers — without a remote machine.

Credits

The usage-based currency most AI builders bill in, typically consumed based on how much AI work a message or build step requires.