Collins' Word of the Year for 2025 revealed (www.rte.ie)

Collins Dictionary has named "vibe coding" its Word of the Year for 2025 after tracking a large spike in usage in its 24-billion-word Collins Corpus. Coined by Andrej Karpathy, the term describes using AI to turn natural language into working software — a level of automation where a developer can "forget that the code even exists." The choice reflects how everyday language and developer practice are converging around tools that translate intent into executable systems, and sits alongside other trending entries that capture tech culture and attitudes toward AI. For the AI/ML community, the recognition is a signal that natural-language-to-code workflows are moving from niche demos to mainstream usage. That has technical implications: growing demand for robust NL-to-code models, better prompt engineering, fine-tuning on code + intent pairs, and integrations with testing, verification, and deployment pipelines to ensure correctness, security, and maintainability. It also shifts where developer value lies — from writing boilerplate to designing prompts, system prompts, and guardrails — while raising research priorities around model interpretability, specification adherence, and dataset quality. In short, "vibe coding" captures both the promise of democratized app creation and the engineering challenges of reliably turning human intent into safe, production-ready code.