Vibe Coding: what it is, how it works, and why it became a priority for companies in 2026

If you work in technology, product, or innovation, you've probably heard the term "vibe coding," and maybe you've even seen someone build an entire application simply by describing, in clear language, what it should do. It's not an exaggeration. It's a real shift in how software is created, and it's happening fast.

In this article, you will understand what vibe coding is, where the term comes from, how the practice evolved between 2025 and 2026, the real size of this market, and, most importantly, what changes when this trend leaves the laptop of an enthusiastic developer and enters the operation of a medium or large company.

What is vibe coding?

Vibe coding is a way of developing software where a person describes, in natural language, the desired outcome, and a generative AI model takes care of writing, testing, and adjusting the corresponding code. Instead of programming line by line, the user conducts a process of short cycles: describing the intention, evaluating the result generated by the AI, and refining it with new commands until reaching the desired version.

The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, former AI director at Tesla and co-founder of OpenAI, in early 2025. According to Karpathy himself, the essence of the practice is to trust the result generated by AI and focus on the final product, without worrying about deeply understanding every line of code produced. The impact of the concept was so great that the British Collins dictionary chose it as word of the year 2025, and Merriam-Webster began monitoring it as a rising expression as early as March of that year.

In practice, there are currently two ways to apply the concept:

• Pure Vibe coding: ideal for ideation and rapid prototyping, when the user almost entirely trusts what the AI ​​produces, without much concern for architecture or production.
• Vibe assisted/enterprise coding: when AI-powered generation is integrated with review, testing, security practices, and connection to the company's real systems, it's the only viable model for applications going into production.

This second layer is what the industry is calling, in 2026, the transition to Agentic Software Engineering: instead of just suggesting code snippets, AI agents plan, execute, test, and debug entire applications under human supervision.

How Vibe Coding works in practice

The typical flow of a vibe coding session follows four steps:

1. Intent: The user describes, in natural language, the problem or application they want ("create a dashboard for the sales team to monitor inventory in real time").
2. Generation: AI interprets the request and generates the necessary interface, logic, and, in some cases, integrations.
3. Iteration: the user tests the result, requests adjustments ("change this screen to include a filter by region"), and the AI ​​refines what already exists.
4. Publication: the application is deployed and, in personal environments, this usually means just a public link; in corporate environments, it means connecting the application to real data, permissions, and security policies.

It is precisely in stage 4 that most market tools, designed for individual developers or small teams, show their limitations when it comes to corporate use.

The size of the vibe coding market

The numbers help to understand why this is not just another passing tech hype:

• The use of AI-assisted coding tools has already become part of the routine for most developers. By the beginning of 2026, 85% of professional developers claimed to regularly use AI agents for programming, while 51% reported daily use (whitepaper The New SDLC with Vibe Coding).
  
• The global vibe coding market was valued at US$3.9 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach US$37 billion by 2032, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.5%, according to Congruence Market Insights.
  
• Around 84% of developers already use or plan to use AI tools to write code, according to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, a fact highlighted by Distrito.
  
• Billion-dollar investments confirm the traction: Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, raised $2.3 billion in a Series D round in November 2025, reaching a valuation of $29.3 billion. The round included participation from investors such as Accel, Coatue, Thrive Capital, a16z, NVIDIA, and Google.
  
  

Market analysts are already pointing out that, by 2027, the distinction between "those who know how to program" and "those who don't" should become increasingly less relevant: anyone capable of clearly describing what they need will be able to transform that idea into functional software. This is a movement that drastically reduces the barrier to entry for creating digital products, both inside and outside of companies.

Why is vibe coding becoming popular in companies (and not just startups)?

Corporate IT teams face a problem that has been known for decades: more demand for systems than delivery capacity. Months-long backlogs, MVPs that take a long time to validate, and business areas that rely on spreadsheets and emails for processes that should already be automated.

The "citizen development" movement has been growing alongside the advancement of vibe coding. Estimates for 2026 point to approximately 16.2 million citizen developers worldwide, a 38% increase compared to the previous year. Projections indicate that this number will surpass 25 million by 2028, while Gartner predicts that, in large companies, citizen developers could outnumber professional developers by a ratio of up to 4 to 1.

But there's an important caveat, and it's the subject of our next article: generating a functional screen is easy. Generating a secure application, integrated with the company's systems and sustainable in the medium term, is a completely different story, and that's where most vibe coding tools on the market, designed for individual use, reach their limit.

Vibe coding isn't just for developers

One of the most interesting effects of this change is the shift in who participates in software creation. Product managers, business analysts, operations teams, and even administrative areas have begun transforming ideas into functional applications in hours, without depending on in-depth technical knowledge. The role of the technical professional also changes: instead of spending most of their time on syntax and low-level logic, they now validate architecture, ensure that the solution is aligned with business objectives, and supervise the quality of what AI produces.

Vibe coding in summary

Next step

Understanding the concept is the first step. The second is understanding why, without the right layer of data, integration, and governance, vibe coding can become a technical liability instead of a business accelerator—a topic we will delve into in the next article in this series, about the risks of corporate vibe coding and how to mitigate them.

If your company is already experiencing IT backlog bottlenecks and wants to understand how to apply vibe coding securely and with real connectivity to your data and systems, learn about Skyone Studio Creator, the Skyone Studio module that combines vibe coding, data integration, and corporate governance in a single platform.

Written by Skyone