“Vibe-coding” just celebrated its first birthday. That’s a lifetime in the AI boom.<\/p>\n
Now, the man who coined the term is celebrating the birth of a new one: “agentic engineering.”<\/p>\n
While vibe-coding is when humans prompt AI to write code, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy<\/a> says agentic engineering is when AI agents write the code themselves. <\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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<\/a> across their teams. And billions are being poured into new vibe-coding companies.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The approach is also threatening traditional engineering jobs. In a Business Insider survey<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n