When did 'vibe coding' first appear, and where did it spread?

timediffusionattestation
Answer

First appearance per corpus, ordered — diffusion measured to the hour.

Methodology

min(timestamp) over a phrase, grouped by corpus: Hacker News's first hit landed 2025-02-03 01:27 UTC and Bluesky's 07:17 the same morning — and the earlier, unrelated 2019 attestations surface too, which recency ranking structurally cannot show. Coinage archaeology, vocabulary birth and death, and cross-community diffusion are all this one query shape.

Last verified: 2026-08-27

Query

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SELECT relation, min(ts) AS first_seen, count() AS n FROM internet.text WHERE relation IN ('hackernews.items','reddit.comments','reddit.posts','forums.posts','stackexchange.posts','bluesky.posts','mailing_lists.messages','internet.documents') AND scry_lex('"vibe coding"') GROUP BY relation ORDER BY first_seen LIMIT 10

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