Vibe Coding was recently named word of the year by Collins Dictionary (Cress, 2025). The term was coined in February 2025 by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, to name how AI can let coders “forget that the code even exists” while making a computer program (Karparthy, 2025).
This new approach has implications for students learning to code yet potentially offers increased accessibility and inclusivity for students who do not need to demonstrate technical acumen but may need to build programs for computational art assignments. This study will use interviews with students at different stages to assess the perceived benefits and concerns of having access to vibe coding.
This is important not just locally, but for the wider HE sector grappling with the widespread adoption of AI tools by students. Autogenerated code impacts courses that specifically assess student’s coding skills or coursework that requires coding. Debates are slowly emerging around the quick adoption of this technology (Meske et al, 2025, Maes, 2025, Ray, 2025, Sarkar and Dross, 2025) however little knowledge has been produced regarding the student experience and how it impacts on inclusive practices (Geng et al, 2025).
References
Cress, L. (2025) ‘Vibe coding’ named word of the year by Collins Dictionary. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpd2y053nleo.
Geng, F., Shah, A., Li, H., Mulla, N., Swanson, S., Raj, G.S., Zingaro, D. and Porter, L., 2025. Exploring Student-AI Interactions in Vibe Coding. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.22614.
Kaparthy, A. (2025) There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”… 2 February. Available at: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 [Accessed: 1 Dec 2025]
Meske, C., Hermanns, T., von der Weiden, E., Loser, K.U. and Berger, T., 2025. Vibe coding as a reconfiguration of intent mediation in software development: Definition, implications, and research agenda. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.21928.
Maes, S.H., 2025. The gotchas of ai coding and vibe coding. it’s all about support and maintenance [online]
Ray, P.P., 2025. A Review on Vibe Coding: Fundamentals, State-of-the-art, Challenges and Future Directions. Authorea Preprints.
| Sarkar, A. and Drosos, I., 2025. Vibe coding: programming through conversation with artificial intelligence. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.23253. |