Let’s kill vibe coding and bring back prompt engineering

The AI development landscape has shifted from prompt engineering to "vibe coding," where developers let AI work without formal planning. This trend, popularized by OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy in 2025, has surged while prompt engineering has declined. Although more powerful language models make decent results easier, the article argues that carefully crafted prompts still produce better, more reliable code than vague requests. Well-structured prompts specifying intent, tech stack, constraints, and task breakdowns lead to superior outputs while saving time. Developers should view AI as an assistant to extend their abilities through thoughtful guidance rather than accepting AI-generated "slop."