Vibe coding is passé. Karpathy has a new name for the future of software.

Andrej Karpathy, the AI researcher who coined the playful term "vibe coding" last year for letting AI write your programs while you just go with the flow, now says those days are over. Large language models have become so sophisticated that professionals need a more rigorous approach he's dubbed "agentic engineering" — where programmers orchestrate AI agents rather than writing code directly, but with careful oversight to maintain quality.

The shift reflects how rapidly AI coding has matured from fun weekend projects to serious professional workflows. Karpathy admits his original "vibe coding" post was just "a shower of thoughts throwaway tweet" that accidentally captured the zeitgeist, earning him a Wikipedia entry in the process.

This evolution aligns with broader predictions that traditional coding may disappear entirely within 15 years, replaced by voice commands and natural language instructions. As one analyst put it, "software is writing software," potentially opening up app development to anyone who can speak their ideas aloud rather than type them in complex programming languages.