In a recent Business Insider article, reporter Stephen Council recounts how a reader survey about the phrase “vibe coding” turned into what he called a vent session. The survey reportedly followed comments from Boris Cherny, the creator of Anthropic’s Claude Code, who reportedly told he had grown tired of the term because it sounds too casual for tools now doing serious work. Council notes that when Business Insider asked readers to propose a better word, the most common answer was blunt: “slop.”
Council notes that answer points to a wider backlash. As vibe coding, broadly the practice of prompting AI to write software, went mainstream over the past year, a counter-current formed around that same word, from two directions. One is the readers in Council’s survey. The other is a term coined months earlier by Daniel Levi at the tech outlet TechStartups.
Below are the key points from Council article:
- The survey. Council writes that a few hundred readers responded to their survey, split roughly in half between those who had used “vibe coding” in the past six months and those who had not. The largest group of suggestions was for “slop” and its variations.
- Why the term grates. According to Council, the complaints were really about what the word implies. Cherny and others say the casual label undersells real engineering work, while critics link it to worries about the quality, security, and maintainability of AI-written code.
- A name for the mess. Back in September 2025, Levi of TechStartups had already coined a label for the failure mode: “vibe slopping,” which he called the “chaotic evil twin” of vibe coding. Where vibe coding is flow and intuition with an AI copilot, Levi writes, vibe slopping is flow that spills into chaos, leaving behind bloated code, quick fixes, and technical debt.
- The view from developers. Levi reportedly pointed to jokes spreading on X and Reddit, where programmers described becoming cleanup crews for AI output, hired to make the machine’s work look less sloppy. He framed the term as part humor, part warning.
- How it spread. Council notes that Andrej Karpathy popularized “vibe coding” in early 2025, and the phrase caught on fast, even landing as Collins Dictionary’s word of the year. Part of what both the survey and the “vibe slopping” label capture is that even daily users of these tools, Cherny among them, have grown uneasy about the name, Council explains.
These two pieces (listed below) approach the issue from different angles, one through Council’s reader survey and the other through Levi’s newly coined term, but they arrive at the same conclusion. Council notes that as AI coding tools become more widespread, the conversation has shifted from the speed and convenience they provide to the problems they can create. And increasingly, people are reaching for the same word to describe it.
Acknowledgement: This summary was generated using AI writing tools as part of my AI Explorations process. For more, see the original articles listed below.