Vibe coding was only recently coined in 2025, but is already the word of the year and has enormous career growth and salary potential
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Collin’s Dictionary just named it the Word of the Year, and researchers say this skill may just be the thing that redefines the next decade of AI innovation and development within the workplace.
Meanwhile, nearly half of product managers surveyed by General Assembly (one of the leading providers of tech certifications and training) wish they possessed this skill, but only 38% actually have it.
It’s not data analysis. It’s not coding. (Well, not directly anyway.) It’s vibe coding.
And we’re seeing more and more of this emerging AI skill in job listings. But why all the hype? Why did vibe coding, only a recently coined term, make it into Collins Dictionary’s highly anticipated Word of the Year?
Why Vibe Coding Is The Word (And Skill) Of The Year
A fantastic example of how vibe coding captured significant attention on the internet was a few months ago when Walmart (the largest private employer in the U.S.) posted a job advert for a senior software engineer and noted, “We’re looking for a creative and technically sharp vibe coder to push for an AI-first development team.” The role was advertizing a salary of up to $220,000/year, per the LinkedIn job post.
Dave Glick, Walmart’s SVP for enterprise business services, posted excitedly on his LinkedIn a couple months back:
“Last Thursday at 5 p.m., I had zero plans. By midnight, we had an agent that builds agents, and I was texting people things like, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ My challenge? Build the machine that builds machines. Give it an SOP and have it spit out a working agent.
“Within minutes, they had agents up and working,” Glick shared excitedly in his LinkedIn post. “I was running around the building, grabbing any leader I could find: ‘You have to see this.’ We had five to 10 agents running side by side, breaking things, fixing them, learning, building, and by midnight, we were 80% of the way to a fully functioning agent builder.
The wildest part, he says, was that no one typed a single line of code. “Everything was generated, iterated, refined, vibe coded. It’s the fastest dev cycle I’ve ever seen, period. This is the future, and the future is here.”
This is what AI skills in action really looks like. And just like AI agents were the hot topic of 2025, we can also expect vibe coding to be the hot topic of 2026 and drastically transform our work.
The year 2026 requires two specific AI skills: understanding AI agents, and knowing how to vibe code
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But what is vibe coding anyway, and why do you need to learn this AI skill?
What Is Vibe Coding?
IBM defines vibe coding on its website as a “new and loosely-defined term in software development that refers to the practice of prompting AI tools to generate code rather than writing code manually.” IBM further explains, “In software engineering, development is reshaping from strict, manual coding and becoming more flexible and AI-powered—and vibe coding is at the forefront of this change.” In other words, instead of you writing code line by line, you can enter a prompt describing your application, what you want it to do, your vision for it, etc., and the LLM will create functional code.
As you can imagine, this significantly lowers barrier to entry when it comes to developing applications at the early stage.
The term “vibe coding” was coined in February 2025 by computer scientist Andrej Karpathy who formerly worked at OpenAI, Tesla, and Google DeepMind.
Pros Of Vibe Coding
Vibe coding is great because:
- You don’t need to be an experienced developer to create an application
- As an entrepreneur or founder, you can create a functional app without hiring someone to oversee product or hiring a developer (initially)
- It makes it easier (and cost-effective) to develop an MVP
- Product managers find this helpful for “prototyping and validating product concepts without needing to depend on engineering,” according to the General Assembly survey, however it notes, as I mentioned earlier, that “only 38% said they are doing so today.”
Cons Of Vibe Coding
Don’t be fooled, there are downsides to vibe coding. It’s a quick fix, but like many quick fixes, there are some trade-offs. Because of these trade-offs, it’s important to think about how and when you plan to vibe code, and adjust your expectations so you’re not wasting your time. Some of the “cons” include:
- Spending enormous amounts of time debugging code
- Potential security vulnerabilities
- Lack of scalability and low-performance issues
- Inability to understand the rationale behind the code
This is why vibe coding is only good for initial MVPs, prototyping/mock-ups, and experimentation.
Ultimately, vibe coding accelerates the development process, but still, human intuition from real engineers, including testing and understanding the “why” behind each step, remains an essential AI skill.
5 Certifications To Learn Vibe Coding For 2026
Here are some certifications and courses to learn vibe coding for 2026:
- Microsoft Learn Free Training–Introduction to Vibe Coding
- Vibe Coding Essentials – Build Apps with AI Specialization (Coursera)
- Vibe Coding 101 with Replit, from DeepLearning.ai
- Intro to Vibe Coding, Codecademy
- Vibe Coding Fundamentals, University of Colorado, Coursera
We are still at the stage where we are realizing the enormous possibilities that come with AI. Vibe coding is one of them. AI agents are another remarkable breakthrough this year. Who knows what’s next for AI skills, use cases, and workplace innovations in 2026?
For now, it’s in your best interest, for your career, your salary progression, and business/market expansion, that you take time to familiarize yourself with the latest trends in the AI world (especially as relates to your industry and role), and upskill in any areas where you feel you have a skill or knowledge gap. And now, that includes vibe coding.
A last note from Glick:
“For a long time, we wondered if Gen AI was overhyped. I think we’re learning it’s underhyped.”
