Vibe coding is passé. Karpathy has a new name for the future of software.
The vibe coding guy is back, and this time he’s talking about “agentic engineering.”
Andrej Karpathy, who last year this time popularized the term “vibe coding,” now says that LLMs have gotten much smarter, such that vibe coding is now passé.
“Today (1 year later), programming via LLM agents is increasingly becoming a default workflow for professionals, except with more oversight and scrutiny,” Karpathy writes in a post he shared last week on X. “The goal is to claim the leverage from the use of agents but without any compromise on the quality of the software.”
In the post, Karpathy says many people have tried to come up with a better name for this concept to differentiate it from vibe coding.
“Personally, my current favorite [is] ‘agentic engineering’: ‘agentic’ because the new default is that you are not writing the code directly 99% of the time, you are orchestrating agents who do and acting as oversight — ‘engineering’ to emphasize that there is an art & science and expertise to it,” Karpathy writes.
Moreover, he says agentic engineering is something folks can learn and improve at.
“In 2026, we’re likely to see continued improvements on both the model layer and the new agent layer,” Karpathy writes. “I feel excited about the product of the two and another year of progress.”
Vibe coding
Last year — February 2, 2025, to be exact – Karpathy posted on X: “There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding’, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g., Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good.”
In this latest post, he calls that post from a year ago, “a shower of thoughts throwaway tweet” that he just fired off without thinking.
“But somehow it minted a fitting name at the right moment for something that a lot of people were feeling at the same time, so here we are: Vibe coding is now mentioned on my Wikipedia as a major memetic ‘contribution,’ and even its article is longer,” he writes.
He notes in the latest post about last year that “at the time, LLM capability was low enough that you’d mostly use vibe coding for fun throwaway projects, demos, and explorations. It was good fu,n and it almost worked.”
In 2023, Andrej Karpathy said English was the hottest new programming language, and from that, he outlined his vision of the AI world and the use of natural language in programming, popularizing the term “vibe coding.”
Software is writing software
The developer function of writing code will slowly disappear over the next five years and will likely be gone altogether 15 years from now, a 2023 Constellation Research report by analyst Holger Mueller reads.
“More importantly, this situation will free developers from the need to master code, because the primary input will be voice rather than keyboard. Voice is faster and more efficient than any typing as an input, but the key innovation is that software is writing software,” the report says.
This would broadly expand the number of people who can build applications, he says.
“Effectively, the move from keyboard to voice and from code to natural language (NL) means that more software will be able to be built and more business users will be able to put themselves in charge of their automation destiny,” the report reads.
In an interview last year, Mueller told The New Stack that he was able to use Microsoft’s Power Platform and ChatGPT to create apps by simply talking and typing. He was vibe coding.
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