“Vibe-coding” just celebrated its first birthday. That’s a lifetime in the AI boom.
Now, the man who coined the term is celebrating the birth of a new one: “agentic engineering.”
While vibe-coding is when humans prompt AI to write code, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy says agentic engineering is when AI agents write the code themselves.
“Many people have tried to come up with a better name for this to differentiate it from vibe coding, personally, my current favorite is ‘agentic engineering,'” he wrote in a recent X post.
Karpathy said he calls it “agentic engineering” not just because agents are writing the code, but because “there is an art & science and expertise to it.”
Vibe-coding is one of the biggest innovations of the AI revolution. Prominent CEOs and startup founders alike are encouraging the use of vibe-coding across their teams. And billions are being poured into new vibe-coding companies.
Lovable, one of Europe’s fastest-growing startups, announced that it had raised $330 million in Series B funding at a $6.6 billion valuation in December. Cursor, an AI-assisted code editor, announced a Series D funding round of $2.3 billion in November and said it had surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue.
The approach is also threatening traditional engineering jobs. In a Business Insider survey of 167 software engineers, 75 engineers said that they were “keeping up,” while 30 said they felt ahead of the curve, and 27 felt behind.
“Vibe coding is now mentioned on my Wikipedia as a major memetic ‘contribution,’ and even its article is longer. lol,” Karpathy wrote on X about its meteoric rise.
Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI in 2015, years before competitors like Anthropic and xAI emerged. He later moved into self-driving technology, leading Tesla’s Autopilot program as head of AI. He’s now building Eureka Labs, which describes itself on its website as building a “new kind of school that is AI native.”
