The man who coined "vibe coding" now calls it passé and has a new name for the grown-up version. Before you wonder whether what you're doing is wrong: here's what he actually said, in his own words, and what it changes for you.
Every few weeks a headline declares vibe coding dead, and every time it lands a little uncomfortably if vibe coding is how you build. The headlines trace back to one post by the person who started the whole thing. Here is what it actually said, because it's much less alarming than the summaries, and more useful.
What Karpathy actually wrote
Andrej Karpathy coined "vibe coding" on 2 February 2025, in a post that The New Stack later quoted in full: "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." A year later, in a post shared in early February 2026, he looked back on it with some distance. By TNS's account he called the original "a shower of thoughts throwaway tweet" — "But somehow it minted a fitting name at the right moment for something that a lot of people were feeling at the same time."
Then came the part the headlines ran with. Karpathy wrote: "Today (1 year later), programming via LLM agents is increasingly becoming a default workflow for professionals, except with more oversight and scrutiny. The goal is to claim the leverage from the use of agents but without any compromise on the quality of the software."
He added that many people had tried to find a better name to separate that from vibe coding, and offered his own: "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." He took the same arc to a Sequoia talk in April, titled "From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering" (this piece cites its title and date; it doesn't summarise it).
So is vibe coding dead? No — read what "passé" is about
Read the quote again: professionals, more oversight and scrutiny, no compromise on quality. Karpathy is describing how experienced engineers now work with agents, and why "vibe" — the part where you "forget that the code even exists" — undersells the discipline they bring to it. It's a statement about the professional standard, not a verdict on someone building a first app in Lovable.
The evidence that the word survived is plain: the term experts prefer, "agentic engineering," is still the less-searched of the two, and Simon Willison, who had floated "vibe engineering" himself, conceded in February: "It looks like the term 'Agentic Engineering' is coming out on top for this now." Coming out on top among people who write about this for a living. In everyday use, "vibe coding" is what people still type, and it's still an accurate name for what you do when you describe an app and let the tool build it. The full set of terms, dated, is in the vibe coding glossary.
What it changes for you
One thing: it gives the habit a name and a standard. If vibe coding is letting the AI build it, agentic engineering is letting the AI build it and acting as oversight — the "oversight and scrutiny" in Karpathy's own sentence. That's the whole difference, and it's the subject of the comparison between the two.
The encouraging part is a detail TNS flagged: Karpathy says agentic engineering is something people can learn and improve at. For someone who doesn't code, "oversight" doesn't mean writing code — it means a short list of things you can actually do:
Not in practice. Karpathy called it passé for professionals, who now direct agents with "more oversight and scrutiny," but it's still the term people search and still describes what you do in tools like Lovable and Bolt. The word stayed; the professional bar rose.
What is agentic engineering?
Karpathy's name, proposed in early February 2026, for working with AI agents where you orchestrate them and act as oversight instead of writing the code directly. "Engineering" signals that there's skill and expertise in doing it well.
Do I have to stop saying vibe coding?
No. It's still the dominant word, and an accurate one for describing an app and letting a tool build it. Use agentic engineering when you want to name the oversight part.
Can a beginner do agentic engineering?
The core of it — reading what the AI built and making it check its own work — doesn't require writing code. Karpathy says it's a skill people can learn and improve at.
This page has no affiliate links or sponsored placements. Karpathy's wording comes from The New Stack's report of his post, which we read directly; his exact posting day is only reported as the week before 10 February 2026, so no day is given here.
