A style of software development in which code is produced primarily through intuition, improvisation, and rapid iteration rather than formal design, testing, or deep architectural planning; especially associated with AI-assisted tools that allow developers to “prompt” systems into generating large blocks of functionality with minimal understanding of the underlying implementation. The emphasis is on momentum and feel—getting something working quickly—often at the expense of robustness, maintainability, or technical clarity.
In contemporary usage, the term describes a workflow where the developer acts more as a curator or prompter than an engineer, accepting, patching, and stacking autogenerated solutions until the project appears to function. While it can accelerate prototyping and experimentation, it is frequently criticized for producing brittle, opaque, or low-quality systems. The phrase was popularized by Andrej Karpathy, who used it to describe this intuition-driven, AI-mediated approach to programming.