The term was used publicly by Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder and former head of AI at Tesla, in February 2025. He described a way of programming where you let the dialogue with the model carry you, accept the code it proposes without reading it line by line, and correct by asking again rather than by editing.
The word was picked up within weeks, first with enthusiasm and then with mockery, which happens to every term that describes something well. Its original definition already carried the nuance both camps forgot: Karpathy described it for throwaway projects, not for production software.
That distinction still matters: describing software to a model is for exploring, not for shipping. Confusing the two produces exactly the results that feed the mockery.