Vibe coding is dead

A critical take on the hype cycle around vibe coding, arguing that it never delivered on its promise of enabling non-technical people to build software. The author contends that 'agentic engineering' is simply a rebrand of traditional software engineering practices like writing specs and decomposing tasks. Drawing a parallel to COBOL's failed goal of democratizing programming, the piece argues that as code generation gets cheaper, the real costs shift to validation, debugging, and maintenance — areas where technical expertise still matters most. The author predicts AI model progress is plateauing and that the industry will eventually drop the trendy terminology and return to calling it software engineering.