“Vibe Coding” vs. “Clanker”: 2025’s Word List is a Battle for the Future of AI

The central conflict of 2025—our simultaneous hope and fear regarding artificial intelligence—is the defining theme of this year’s Collins Dictionary Word of the Year list. The winner, “vibe coding,” and the top contender, “clanker,” are two sides of the same AI coin, battling for linguistic dominance.
“Vibe coding,” the optimistic winner, is the practice of using natural language to create software with AI. Coined by OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy, it represents AI as a democratic tool that “makes coding more accessible” and fosters a “seamless integration of human creativity and machine intelligence,” according to Collins’ Alex Beecroft.
On the other side, “clanker” is the language of the AI backlash. This Star Wars-derived insult for robots went viral as a term of frustration for clumsy, unreliable, and distrusted AI chatbots. Its inclusion on the list shows the widespread nature of this technological anxiety.
The victory of “vibe coding” suggests that, in 2025, the language of AI’s potential spread further and faster than the language of its rejection. Lexicographers at Collins, monitoring a 24-billion-word corpus, saw a “huge increase” in the winner’s usage since February.
This AI-dominated list also included “broligarchy” (the tech elite building the AI) and “biohacking” (using tech to “program” our bodies), showing how deeply these concepts are now embedded in our world.