Vibe coding era over? AI guru who coined the term says time has come for agentic engineering now

The era of vibe coding may be over. AI guru Andrej Karpathy believes that the world will now move to a new way of using AI to write code, what he calls agentic engineering. Here is what it means.

We have all heard about vibe coding – the use of AI to write code. And in recent months, vibe coding has become increasingly popular. However, AI guru Andrej Karpathy, who coined this term, believes that we are now moving to a new style of coding, what he calls “agentic engineering.”

On X, Karpathy shared a post, detailing his thoughts about the future of coding. He pointed out that he did not expect the term vibe coding to become so widely used. Almost every tech company or personality has referred to vibe coding in some form or other in the past year. He added, “Vibe coding is now mentioned on my Wikipedia as a major memetic 'contribution' and even its article is longer”

However, when Andrej Karpathy introduced the term vibe coding, in February 2025, the landscape was different. The AI pioneer explained, "Large Language Model (LLM) capability was low enough that you'd mostly use vibe coding for fun throwaway projects, demos and explorations."

Over the past year, Karpathy claims that there has been a noticeable shift in how AI is used, with vibe coding becoming a default for programmers. He added, "The goal is to claim the leverage from the use of agents but without any compromise on the quality of the software."

To capture this change, Karpathy introduced a new term that he feels better describes the new AI-assisted workflow: "Many people have tried to come up with a better name for this to differentiate it from vibe coding, personally my current favorite 'agentic engineering.’” A screenshot of Andrej Karpathy's post on X.

The AI guru explained that he chose this term as humans have started using AI agents to write virtually all the code. While humans themselves are now more focused on overseeing what the agent creates. He wrote, “'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.”