After Claude Code creator Boris Cherny told Business Insider at Anthropic's developer conference that he'd grown tired of the phrase "vibe coding," we asked readers for input on a new name. Readers largely answered with one word: "slop."
"Vibe coding" has become a go-to techie term for telling AI to write code. To solicit ideas for a new term, Business Insider put out a survey asking for suggestions and about how people vibe code.
A few hundred responses rolled in, split about 50-50 between people who said they'd vibe coded within the last six months and those who hadn't. A clear majority of readers used the survey to bash or belittle the topic at hand, showing how many people feel negative sentiment toward the technology and anxiety about employment.
By far the largest group of responses poked at the new tech with the term "slop," which boomed in use over the last few years as the public began to grapple with text, images, and videos created by generative AI. Readers suggested we do the same to describe AI code, with "slopcoding," "slopmaxxing," or "slop spitting." Some other entries include "slopping," "slopify," and "Slop as a Service (SaaS)."
"Clanker," a derogatory term for AI machines and a "Star Wars" reference, also made a few appearances in the data. Readers suggested "vulnerability creation" — a nod to AI code's potential for cybersecurity breaches — and "garbage generation." Readers also suggested terms like "cheapskating coding" and "proscamming.
Two responses, demonstrating fears over AI's impact on the job market, included "unemployment." One suggested replacing the term with "job destruction."
In addition, one respondent wrote that they hadn't used a vibe coding tool "because I actually know how to write code." Another suggested "prompt and pray," writing that they'd used the tools to make a "garbage version" of two basic video games.
The responses weren't entirely negative. "Prompt coding," "autocode," and "token shaping" showed up among the suggestions, as did "speech to code," "choreo-coding," and "agentic engineering."
Business Insider sent over a few reader suggestions to Cherny, and nothing took. He's OK with "autocoding" and "agentic engineering," which, like "vibe coding," was coined by Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI founding member who recently announced he's joining Anthropic. Cherny said neither has quite the right ring.
One reader, who said they mainly use Claude Code for auditing their homelab's security, said they call that work "Claudits." They wrote: "'Vibe Coding' means so many things. Are you building, designing, auditing, cleaning?"
That may be the main reason it's hard to find a replacement — "vibe" is already a catch-all term.
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Stephen is a Senior Tech Reporter at Business Insider, covering OpenAI, Anthropic and the ecosystem around the leading artificial intelligence companies.Previously he covered technology at SFGATE, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Information and CNBC. He studied journalism and economics at Northwestern University.His work has earned an SF Press Club Investigative Reporting Award and, in 2025, SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award for Technology Reporting.Stephen lives in San Francisco. Contact him via email a [email protected], or on Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.
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