Vibe Coding Is Dead. Here’s What Replaced It.

Andrej Karpathy coined 'vibe coding' in early 2025, but a year later he moved on to a new term: 'agentic engineering.' The core distinction isn't about tools — it's about discipline. Vibe coding means accepting AI output without review; agentic engineering means AI handles implementation while the human owns architecture, quality, and correctness. Vibe coding failed in production due to security vulnerabilities introduced at scale, unmaintainable architectures from skipping design phases, and context collapse in long sessions. Agentic engineering replaces it with four habits: writing a spec before prompting, breaking work into scoped tasks, reviewing every diff with the same rigor as a human PR, and testing relentlessly. Companies like Stripe, Zapier, and TELUS are posting real results using this approach. The developer role is shifting from code author to architect — defining problems clearly and judging AI output accurately.