Vibe coding
A term this hub keeps meeting and never in the same job twice. Paged 2026-09-01, when vibe-coding-prompt-template arrived using it to mean the opposite of what context-driven-development uses it to mean.
Four senses, four spokes
| Sense | Where | What it means there |
|---|---|---|
| The undisciplined pole | context-driven-development (Google's Conductor post) | "Jump straight to code, intent improvised in chat and lost when the session ends" — the practice SDD and CDD exist to correct |
| A disclosure of risk | termux-launcher (../foss-applications-wiki) |
The author's own warning box: "This project is entirely vibe-coded." Offered as a caveat about what the code has and has not been through |
| A banned contribution mode | godot-contribution-policy-2026 (../game-engines-wiki) |
The Godot Foundation auto-bans autonomous agents and "vibe coding" from contributions — a thing a project can refuse to accept |
| A disciplined workflow | vibe-coding-prompt-template | The name of a five-step method with research, a PRD, a tech design, AGENTS.md, plan-approval gates and evidence requirements |
The first and the fourth are direct contradictions. One names the absence of artifacts; the other names a workflow built out of nothing but artifacts, and it has 2,984 stars.
What the drift looks like
Read in order, the senses trace a term detaching from a method and attaching to a situation: originally "coding by improvisation with an LLM", it now often means no more than "code produced with heavy AI involvement", with the discipline left unspecified. Both the disclosure sense and the ban sense work that way already — neither is a statement about whether a plan existed, only about who or what wrote the code.
That matters beyond vocabulary, in two places this hub has records of:
- As a warning, it no longer carries information. termux-launcher's author uses it to say "assume less review than usual" (that spoke's reading: an assurance gap, not a bug report). If the same word also labels a workflow with approval gates and a review checklist, the disclosure stops narrowing anything.
- As a policy term, it needs a test. A rule that bans "vibe coding" (godot-contribution-policy-2026) has to be enforceable against a submitted patch, and the four senses above do not agree on what would be evidence.
Why it sits in this spoke
The discipline vocabulary lives here — spec-driven-development, context-driven-development, agentic-coding-harness — and this term is defined mostly by contrast with them. It is the pole the other two are positioned against, which is precisely why it being reclaimed by a CDD-shaped workflow is worth holding.
Related
context-driven-development · spec-driven-development · vibe-coding-prompt-template · agentic-coding-harness