"Every era generates its own hollow buzzwords. In the early 2000s, it was "synergy" and "paradigm shift." A decade later, "growth hacking" and "disruption." In design, "design thinking" and "human-centered" followed a similar arc - once powerful, later reduced to slogans. These words were meant to inspire, but overuse and vagueness drained them of meaning. The first time I heard the phrase "vibe coding," I felt a wave of déjà vu."
"The words carried the same hollow ring I remembered from the early days of the "metaverse" - a term lifted from Neal Stephenson's 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash and later stretched by tech companies to describe immersive 3D worlds. As I described it in The body remains the interface , it became a mantra after Facebook's rebrand inside Meta, repeated endlessly even though no one could explain it."
Every era produces new buzzwords that begin with promise but become hollow through overuse and vagueness. Examples include "synergy," "paradigm shift," "growth hacking," "disruption," "design thinking," and "human-centered." Overuse turns inspiring concepts into slogans lacking clear meaning. The term "metaverse" originated in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and was stretched by companies into an ill-defined mantra after Facebook's rebrand to Meta. "Vibe coding" was introduced in February 2025 by Andrej Karpathy to describe programming via plain language. Both modest-origin and hyped terms follow the same pattern of vagueness becoming intentional, leaving substance behind.
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