Type: url
Original: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/23/semantic-diffusion/
Status: generated
Summary
A link post in which Simon Willison introduces Martin Fowler’s 2006 term “semantic diffusion” — the weakening of a coined term’s definition as it spreads beyond the people who coined it — and presents the ongoing redefinition of “vibe coding” to mean any LLM-written code as a clear instance of the effect. It quotes Fowler’s original definition, Willison’s own frustrated note about losing the battle over the term, and a reply from Andrej Karpathy saying definitions take time to settle and that he himself rarely goes “full out vibe coding”.