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I learned this term just now from Simon Willison who quoted the following from Martin Fowler:

Semantic diffusion occurs when you have a word that is coined by a person or group, often with a pretty good definition, but then gets spread through the wider community in a way that weakens that definition. This weakening risks losing the definition entirely - and with it any usefulness to the term.

While Simon is lamenting the diffusion of the meaning of Vibe Coding, Martin, back in 2006, was seeing this happen with terms like Agile and Web2.0.

Semantic diffusion is essentially a succession of the telephone game where a different group of people to the originators of a term start talking about it without being careful about following the original definition. These people are listened to by a further group which then goes on to add their own distortions. After a few of these hand-offs it's easy to lose a lot of the key meaning of the term unless you make the point of going back to the originators. It's ironic that it's popular terms that tend to suffer from this the most. That's inevitable, of course, since unpopular terms have less people to create the telephone chains.

Hope is not lost though.

So terms do recover their semantic integrity and the current diffusion doesn't inevitably mean the terms will lose their meaning… A final comforting thought is that once the equally inevitable backlash comes we get a refocusing on the original meaning.

So once the hype dies down, the broader understanding of vibe coding may settle back on the kind of coding:

where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists… It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects.