Vibe-research, explained.

We coined the term in 2026 to pair with what Andrej Karpathy called vibe coding when it became the dominant pattern for solo founders shipping with AI. The two terms describe the same workflow at different stages: vibe coding is the building, vibe-research is the deciding-what-to-build.

In early 2024, Karpathy described what would become the default pattern for non-engineer founders shipping software in 2025 and 2026: type the rough idea into an AI tool, accept what it produces, iterate, ship. The term stuck because it described what was already happening across Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, v0, Claude Code, and Replit Agent.

The audience is enormous. Lovable reportedly hit 8M users in 2025 with a $6.6B valuation. Cursor's parent company Anysphere is at $9B+ valuation with 7M monthly active users. The r/vibecoding subreddit has 150K members and posts 45K times a month. According to internal Lovable data widely reported in 2026, around 60% of users are non-developers.

The pattern is durable. The bottleneck has shifted from coding to deciding what to code.

Vibe coders ship fast. Validation lags. The LLM in your IDE helps you build. It does not help you decide whether to build. Generic AI tools like ChatGPT can give a vibe check on an idea, but they do not run a structured pipeline, they do not cite primary sources, and the same prompt returns different scores between runs.

The job founders need done is specific: cited evidence, named risks, a numerical score, and a build outline, in the time it takes to brew a coffee. That is the gap vibe-research fills.

Five characteristics, all checkable on any output that claims the label:

1. **Structured.** A defined pipeline runs the research, not an open prompt. Verdikt's pipeline is five stages: intake, market sizing, competitive map, 10× claim test, risk synthesis. 2. **Cited.** Every claim links to a primary source. Sources are tier-graded so the reader can weigh the evidence. 3. **Software-generated.** No human analyst in the loop. The output is a software-generated digital research artifact, delivered on demand. 4. **Fast.** Minutes, not weeks. Manual market research takes one to four weeks; vibe-research compresses that to the time it takes to read the output. 5. **Founder-readable.** The output is for a builder, not an analyst. The Verdikt Score sits on the cover; the named risks are at the top; every citation is footnoted to a source you can verify.

It is not investment advice, financial advice, career advice, legal advice, or business advice of any kind.

It is not a substitute for talking to real users. Five 20-minute customer conversations will surface things no research pipeline can.

It is not a guarantee. The Verdikt Score is descriptive of the evidence the pipeline surfaced, not predictive of outcomes.

It is not a pitch deck. The audience is the founder, not an investor.

Every Verdikt report breaks the score into four sub-scores, each rated 0 to 10, each backed by named sources:

- **Market.** Bottom-up market sizing. TAM, SAM, SOM, each grounded in primary databases. - **Competition.** Direct competitors, indirect substitutes, and the do-nothing alternative. The 10× claim test runs an adversarial pass to break the differentiation claim. - **Demand.** Willingness-to-pay signals from buyer language, comparable pricing, and substitute cost. - **Stack Fit.** Whether the idea is realistic to build with the tools the founder is using (Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, v0, Claude Code, Replit).

A Verdikt Score above 70 indicates the evidence supports the thesis. Between 40 and 69, the evidence is mixed and more validation is needed. Below 40, the evidence challenges the thesis. The score is descriptive of the evidence, not a directive.

The free version: run the free Verdikt on the idea, get a Verdikt Score plus the top three named risks. Use the output to decide whether to invest more research time.

The paid version: Single Report at $49.99 for the full memo with 40+ citations, named risks with thresholds, a build outline with stack and tool options, and launch-channel research notes. Refund or re-run for documented report errors.

The manual version: the how-to-validate-a-startup-idea playbook walks through running the same dimensions yourself over one to four weeks.

We are not the only ones who will do this. The category is wide open and the methodology will get better. The framing matters because it gives founders a name for the work that sits between vibe coding and shipping. Without the name, the work disappears: founders skip it because no one told them to do it, and ship into silence.

With the name, the work has a place in the workflow. Pitch becomes brief. Brief becomes vibe-research. Vibe-research becomes a verdict. Verdict becomes a build decision.

That is the loop.