Vibe coding dictionary

Honest definitions of the terms vibe coders use to cover up what's actually happening.

vibe coding

programming by trusting the AI

deploy

the rite of moving bugs to prod

prod

where code meets reality and loses

staging

a legend juniors believe in

legacy

code that works and nobody knows why

bug

a feature nobody agreed to

feature

a bug the manager liked

refactoring

asking the AI to rewrite everything from scratch

debugging

pasting the error into the chat and praying

code review

asking a second AI about the first one

tech debt

a legacy-world concept, doesn't apply to us

documentation

your chat history with the AI

testing

deploying to prod

architecture

whatever the AI drew in ASCII

commit

a time capsule of your regrets

merge conflict

an argument between two past versions of you

CI/CD

a pipeline that delivers bugs faster

linter

the voice of conscience you muted

npm install

downloading half the internet for one function

node_modules

a black hole on your disk

rollback

deploying back into a past that also didn't work

hotfix

the prompt “fix it now, the client can see it”

on-call

a lottery where the prize is a sleepless night

standup

a daily public lie about progress

estimate

a number multiplied by optimism

retro

a meeting where nothing changes

scope creep

how a project quietly becomes a monster

MVP

something you're ashamed of that's already in prod

senior

whoever has the more expensive subscription

pet project

a prod project that hasn't gone down yet

AI assistant

a co-author who takes no responsibility

prompt

an incantation of varying desperation

API

the thing that changes the moment you rely on it

frontend

where “it works on my machine”

backend

where it also works on my machine

fullstack

broken everywhere, but everywhere

junior

someone who still believes in the docs

middle

someone who stopped believing

agile

scheduled daily chaos

sprint

two weeks to not make it

backlog

a graveyard of good ideas

demo

a play where everything suddenly works

postmortem

a meeting to assign blame

kubernetes

a way to complicate what was already broken

docker

“it works in my container”

cache

where your main bug lives

crutch

a temporary fix since 2019

mock

the thing that works better than the real service

feature flag

a switch everyone forgot about

rebase

rewrite history and regret it

force push

git push --force, one last time

stack trace

a poem about where it all went wrong

microservice

a monolith split into 40 problems

monolith

microservices that gave up

DevOps

one person for everything, and they're to blame too

KPI

a number we draw for the report

deadline

when real development begins

stakeholder

the one who changes requirements on Friday

scaling

throwing servers at the problem

high load

three users at once