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Vibe coding was only recently coined in 2025, but is already the word of the year and has enormous career growth and salary potential<\/p>\n
getty<\/p>\n
Collin\u2019s Dictionary just named it the Word of the Year<\/a>, and researchers say<\/a> this skill may just be the thing that redefines the next decade of AI innovation and development within the workplace. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n It\u2019s not data analysis. It\u2019s not coding. (Well, not directly anyway.) It\u2019s vibe coding. <\/p>\n And we\u2019re 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\u2019s highly anticipated Word of the Year?<\/p>\n Why Vibe Coding Is The Word (And Skill) Of The Year<\/p>\n 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, \u201cWe\u2019re looking for a creative and technically sharp vibe coder to push for an AI-first development team.\u201d The role was advertizing a salary of up to $220,000\/year, per the LinkedIn job post.<\/a><\/p>\n Dave Glick, Walmart\u2019s SVP for enterprise business services, posted excitedly on his LinkedIn <\/a>a couple months back: <\/p>\n \u201cLast 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, \u2018You\u2019re not going to believe this.\u2019 My challenge? Build the machine that builds machines. Give it an SOP and have it spit out a working agent. <\/p>\n \u201cWithin minutes, they had agents up and working,\u201d Glick shared excitedly in his LinkedIn post. “I was running around the building, grabbing any leader I could find: \u2018You have to see this.\u2019 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. <\/p>\n The wildest part, he says, was that no one typed a single line of code. \u201cEverything was generated, iterated, refined, vibe coded. It\u2019s the fastest dev cycle I\u2019ve ever seen, period. This is the future, and the future is here.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The year 2026 requires two specific AI skills: understanding AI agents, and knowing how to vibe code<\/p>\n getty<\/p>\n But what is vibe coding anyway, and why do you need to learn this AI skill?<\/p>\n What Is Vibe Coding?<\/p>\n IBM defines vibe coding<\/a> on its website as a \u201cnew and loosely-defined term in software development that refers to the practice of prompting AI tools to generate code rather than writing code manually.\u201d IBM further explains, \u201cIn software engineering, development is reshaping from strict, manual coding and becoming more flexible and AI-powered\u2014and vibe coding is at the forefront of this change.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n As you can imagine, this significantly lowers barrier to entry when it comes to developing applications at the early stage.<\/p>\n The term \u201cvibe coding\u201d was coined in February 2025 by computer scientist Andrej Karpathy<\/a> who formerly worked at OpenAI, Tesla, and Google DeepMind. <\/p>\n Pros Of Vibe Coding<\/p>\n Vibe coding is great because:<\/p>\n You don\u2019t need to be an experienced developer to create an applicationAs 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 \u201cprototyping and validating product concepts without needing to depend on engineering,\u201d 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<\/p>\n Don\u2019t be fooled, there are downsides to vibe coding. It\u2019s a quick fix, but like many quick fixes, there are some trade-offs. Because of these trade-offs, it\u2019s important to think about how and when you plan to vibe code, and adjust your expectations so you\u2019re not wasting your time. Some of the \u201ccons\u201d<\/a> include:<\/p>\n Spending enormous amounts of time debugging codePotential security vulnerabilitiesLack of scalability and low-performance issuesInability to understand the rationale behind the code<\/p>\n This is why vibe coding is only good for initial MVPs, prototyping\/mock-ups, and experimentation.<\/p>\n Ultimately, vibe coding accelerates the development process, but still, human intuition from real engineers, including testing and understanding the \u201cwhy\u201d behind each step, remains an essential AI skill.<\/p>\n 5 Certifications To Learn Vibe Coding For 2026<\/p>\n Here are some certifications and courses to learn vibe coding for 2026:<\/p>\n