We still need to talk about vibe coding: Reflections on 2025's word of the year

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Careers, Business, 907234, Technology

4.7 • 53 Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Vibe coding was, remarkably, named word of the year by the Collins English Dictionary at the start of November 2025 — pretty good going for a term that was only coined in February. We first discussed it on the Technology Podcast back in April, and, given its prominence in the collective lexicon this year, thought we should revisit and reflect on the topic as 2025 draws to a close.

Lots has happened in the intervening months: MCP adoption, the evolution of agentic coding tools and practices like context engineering have had a significant impact on the way the world is thinking about and using AI.

To talk about it all and reflect on the implications, Thoughtworkers and regular podcast hosts Prem Chandrasekaran, Lilly Ryan and Neal Ford reconvened for a follow up to our April conversation. Taking in everything from the term's semantic slipperiness, its security risks and the challenges of maintaining AI-generated code, this is a discussion that, despite going deep into vibe coding, also touches on a huge range of issues in the technology industry today.

Before we enter 2026, looking back on the good, the bad and the ugly of the last 12 months of experimentation is essential if we're to build better software for the world in the future. This episode aims to be a guide through that process.

Listen to our April episode on vibe coding: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/podcasts/technology-podcasts/vibe-coding

Read Ken Mugrage's blog post exploring the shift from vibe coding to context engineering in 2025: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/machine-learning-and-ai/vibe-coding-context-engineering-2025-software-development

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone. Welcome to yet another episode of the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast. My name is Prame. I'm one of the regular hosts on the podcast. I've got two of my colleagues here, Lily and Neil, do you folks want to introduce
0:22.4	yourselves? Hi. Yes. I'm Lily. I'm a principal cybersecurity engineer here at Thoughtworks.
0:29.2	Hi, I'm Neil Ford, also one of your regular hosts, and we couldn't actually figure out how to
0:34.9	assign host and guest for this particular episode.
0:46.4	So we're all sort of host and guest for this because this is a part two follow-up episode about vibe coding. About six months ago, we, the three of us plus our colleague Brigita recorded a podcast about vibe coding that was happened right at the time that vibe
0:56.7	coding became a popular meme. We'll talk about that in just a second. And this is a follow-up six
1:02.0	months later as to how the world has sort of consumed and encapsulated the concept of vibe coding and what it has become over the course
1:13.7	of the last six months.
1:15.3	One of the things that we talked about in that previous episode, in fact, we started
1:18.7	the previous episode with this concept of semantic diffusion, which Martin Fowler,
1:24.4	our chief scientist, I think defined or at least popularize this idea that
1:28.6	any term that you put out there when it's used enough, the meaning of it will start diffusing
1:33.1	and people will start applying whatever meaning they want to it. And so we should probably
1:37.8	start off this podcast with giving a definition that we can work with throughout this podcast
1:43.8	as to what vibe coding is,
1:45.9	because one of the things that we're going to talk about is the wide variety of definitions
1:50.5	and attitudes that exist out in the world.
1:53.0	So who wants to give us a working definition of vibe coding as it currently stands?
1:59.1	It started with this tweet that Andre Carpathie, Dr. Andi Carpathie made where he said that he just
2:05.8	gives in to his vibes.
2:07.1	He does not look at the software that's produced.
2:10.3	He just chats with the AI and then at the end of it he gets some working software.
	...

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