Vibe Coding vs Agentic Engineering: 21 Terms Compared
Vibe coding, introduced by Andrej Karpathy on 2 February 2025, means accepting AI-written code without reading it. Set against it are 20 other names for working with AI in software development: disciplines, methods, lifecycles, techniques and a tool category. Each is compared on who writes the code and what checks it.
A vendor deck promises AI-driven development. The CTO’s memo asks for agentic engineering. The policy bans vibe coding, and the engineer shipping the feature calls it AI-assisted coding. Four names are in play, and two of them say nothing about who checks the code. This page is for the tech lead or CTO who has to write one of these names into a policy, and for the developer who has to explain the difference.
What you’ll walk away with from these 21 definitions
Section titled “What you’ll walk away with from these 21 definitions”- One table that places 21 names by kind, origin and how each differs from vibe coding, each linked to its own definition page
- The origin of each name with its date, and the “coined by” claims the dated sources do not support
- A verbatim contrast with vibe coding for each name, or a label saying the contrast is our analysis
- Our placement of vibe coding on the autonomy ladder, with the nearest primary evidence
- Three copy-paste prompts that classify how your own repository’s loops are verified
How do the 21 names differ from vibe coding?
Section titled “How do the 21 names differ from vibe coding?”Dates are the earliest dated use the research found, not proven firsts. Every quote below links to the page it comes from. Where a source offers no contrast with vibe coding, the contrast is labelled “our reading”.
| Name | Kind of thing | Named or popularised by | How it differs from vibe coding |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vibe coding | Technique | Andrej Karpathy, 2 Feb 2025 | The anchor |
| Vibe engineering | Discipline (a name that lost) | Simon Willison proposed it, 7 Oct 2025 | Same idea as agentic engineering, with “vibe” kept on purpose |
| Augmented coding | Personal practice | Kent Beck, 18 Apr 2025 | You care about the code, not only the behaviour |
| Agentic engineering | Discipline | In use from 2025; endorsed by Karpathy, 4 Feb 2026 | Same agents, opposite stance on accountability |
| Agentic coding | Tool capability | No single coiner; earliest use found, Anthropic, 21 Jun 2024 | Names what the tool does, not how carefully you use it |
| AI-assisted coding | Umbrella category | No coiner; DORA 2025 report title, 23 Sep 2025 | The superset: vibe coding is its “less responsible subset” (Willison) |
| AI pair programming | Interaction framing | GitHub Copilot, 29 Jun 2021 (earlier: Codota, 2017) | The human reads every suggestion; vibe coding reads none |
| Agentic software development | Lifecycle | No coiner; Microsoft’s “agentic DevOps”, 19 May 2025 | Scope is the whole lifecycle, not one session |
| Agentic SDLC (AI SDLC) | Lifecycle and operating model | No coiner; used by Gartner, Forrester and Anthropic in 2026 | Vibe coding has no stages and no gates |
| AI-DLC | Methodology (AWS) | AWS, Raja SP, 31 Jul 2025 | Built to stop the “accept all” habit (our reading) |
| AI-native development | Organisational paradigm | Tessl, Guy Podjarny, 6 Jul 2024 | A property of a team’s process, not one person’s review habit |
| AI-driven development | Generic adjective | No owner; AWS’s “AI-Driven Development Lifecycle”, 31 Jul 2025 | “AI-driven” says who leads; vibe coding says whether anyone reads |
| Spec-driven development | Method | No single AI-era coiner; Kiro, 14 Jul 2025; GitHub Spec Kit, 2 Sep 2025 | Vendors position it as the step after vibe coding |
| Compound engineering | Method and plugin | Kieran Klaassen, Every, 18 Aug 2025 | Every treats vibe coding as a fast path inside its system |
| Prompt engineering | Technique | No coiner; in use around GPT-3 in 2020 | Different axis: the quality of the input, not review of the output |
| Context engineering | Discipline | Popularised by Tobi Lütke, 19 Jun 2025, and Karpathy, 25 Jun 2025 | Vibe coding curates nothing; context engineering curates what the agent reads |
| Harness engineering | Discipline | Mitchell Hashimoto, 5 Feb 2026; an OpenAI post popularised it, 11 Feb 2026 | Replaces reading the output with automated checks |
| AI coding agents | Tool category | No coiner | The tool; vibe coding is one way to use it |
| Agentic workflows | Design approach | Popularised by Andrew Ng, Mar 2024 | Different axis: checking inside the loop, not removed after it |
| Agent orchestration | Technique and tool category | No coiner; Anthropic’s orchestrator-worker pattern, 13 Jun 2025 | Not the opposite of vibe coding; verification is |
| AI engineering | Discipline and job role | Popularised by swyx, 30 Jun 2023 | Different axis: what is built, not how the code is written |
The last column is our reading, except for AI-assisted coding, spec-driven development and compound engineering, where it follows a source’s own contrast (quoted in each name’s section below).
What is vibe coding, and which names grew up around it?
Section titled “What is vibe coding, and which names grew up around it?”Three names come from the original post and the argument that followed it: the term itself, the proposed replacement, and Kent Beck’s name that began as a synonym and became its contrast.
What is vibe coding?
Section titled “What is vibe coding?”Andrej Karpathy introduced the term in an X post on 2 February 2025: “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.” The same post sets the review rule: “I ‘Accept All’ always, I don’t read the diffs anymore.” Collins Dictionary named it its Word of the Year for 2025 on 6 November 2025. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary entry (Wayback capture of 18 September 2026) defines it broadly as “the act or practice of using an artificial intelligence system to generate computer code”. Simon Willison keeps the narrow sense: “building software with an LLM without reviewing the code it writes” (19 March 2025). This page uses the narrow sense. Willison’s post gives the coinage date as 6 February, but the original post is timestamped 2 February 2025 (23:17 UTC), and Merriam-Webster’s etymology note also says February 2, 2025. See the vibe coding glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: The model writes; nobody reads the diff, the human checks behaviour by eye.
What is vibe engineering?
Section titled “What is vibe engineering?”Simon Willison proposed the name on 7 October 2025 for “the other end of the spectrum, where seasoned professionals accelerate their work with LLMs while staying proudly and confidently accountable for the software they produce”. He did not invent the words: Sergey Tselovalnikov titled a post “There is no Vibe Engineering” on 31 March 2025, and Brendan O’Leary’s talk “From Vibe Coding to Vibe Engineering” is dated 29 April 2025. Willison’s contrast: vibe coding is “the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to how the code actually works.” On 23 February 2026 he added to the same post: “It looks like the term ‘Agentic Engineering’ is coming out on top for this now.” Addy Osmani gave the reason on 4 February 2026: “the word ‘vibe’ carries too much baggage. It signals casualness.” Our reading: the name that lost the naming contest to agentic engineering, for the same idea. See the vibe engineering glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: Agents write; the accountable professional checks.
What is augmented coding (AI-augmented development)?
Section titled “What is augmented coding (AI-augmented development)?”Two names share a word and should not be merged. Kent Beck’s earliest use of “augmented coding” found is from 18 April 2025: “I have been doing a lot of vibe coding (which I call ‘augmented coding’ for reasons that will become clear).” By 25 June 2025 he drew the line: “In vibe coding you don’t care about the code, just the behavior of the system. If there’s an error, you feed it back into the genie in hopes of a good enough fix. In augmented coding you care about the code, its complexity, the tests, & their coverage.” Gartner’s separate category, AI-augmented development, is in its press release of 16 October 2023: “the use of AI technologies, such as GenAI and machine learning, to aid software engineers in designing, coding and testing applications.” See the augmented coding glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: The “genie” writes; the programmer checks through tests and design.
Which names sit closest to agentic engineering?
Section titled “Which names sit closest to agentic engineering?”Four names sit closest to agentic engineering, at different scopes: a discipline, a tool capability, an umbrella and an interaction style. Only the discipline names a quality bar.
What is agentic engineering?
Section titled “What is agentic engineering?”The phrase was in use before Andrej Karpathy endorsed it. Mario Zechner wrote of “what people call ‘agentic engineering’” on 2 June 2025, and Peter Steinberger titled a post “Just Talk To It - the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering” on 14 October 2025. Karpathy called it “personally my current favorite” on 4 February 2026 and stated the goal: “to claim the leverage from the use of agents but without any compromise on the quality of the software”. Willison defines it as building software using coding agents, “where the defining feature is that they can both generate and execute code—allowing them to test that code and iterate on it independently of turn-by-turn guidance from their human supervisor” (23 February 2026).
Osmani’s contrast, 4 February 2026: “Vibe coding = YOLO. Agentic engineering = AI does the implementation, human owns the architecture, quality, and correctness.” The shortest version is in Karpathy’s published transcript of his Sequoia Ascent talk (30 April 2026; the page says an LLM produced the summary and cleaned up the transcript, and that Karpathy read them): “Vibe coding raises the floor. Agentic engineering is about extrapolating the ceiling.” See the state of agentic engineering and the agentic engineering glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: Agents write; the human owns quality, tests and evals check.
What is agentic coding?
Section titled “What is agentic coding?”No single coiner is established. The earliest dated use the research found is Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet announcement of 21 June 2024, which cites “an internal agentic coding evaluation”. Anthropic made it a product category with Claude Code on 24 February 2025: “a command line tool for agentic coding”. An academic definition, from Sapkota, Roumeliotis and Karkee (26 May 2025): “agentic coding enables autonomous software development through goal-driven agents capable of planning, executing, testing, and iterating tasks with minimal human intervention.” Hassan et al. draw the line to the discipline: “elevating the practice from agentic coding to true agentic software engineering” (7 September 2025).
Our reading: agentic coding and vibe coding are not opposites. Karpathy’s original vibe coding ran in an AI editor (“Cursor Composer w Sonnet”), and nothing stops anyone from accepting everything an agentic coding tool does. Agentic coding says what does the work; vibe coding says how much you look. See the agentic coding glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: An agent in a write-run-test loop; the term is silent on checking.
What is AI-assisted coding (AI-assisted development)?
Section titled “What is AI-assisted coding (AI-assisted development)?”It is an umbrella with no coiner. DORA’s 2025 report is titled “State of AI-Assisted Software Development” (23 September 2025), and Wikipedia’s article, in its revision of 5 October 2026, defines the field as “the use of large language models (LLMs) and AI agents to assist software developers in software development”. Willison’s tag for it reads: “Using AI tools such as Large Language Models to help write code. Vibe coding is the less responsible subset of this.” He explains why the name never worked as a brand: “I’ve tried in the past to get terms like AI-assisted programming to stick, with approximately zero success.” And what falls outside vibe coding, in his 2025 definition: “If an LLM wrote the code for you, and you then reviewed it, tested it thoroughly and made sure you could explain how it works to someone else that’s not vibe coding, it’s software development.” The autonomy ladder on this site uses “assisted” more narrowly, for Level 1. See the AI-assisted coding glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: Human, AI or both; the term does not say who checks.
What is AI pair programming?
Section titled “What is AI pair programming?”GitHub Copilot popularised the phrase in its launch post of 29 June 2021, “Introducing GitHub Copilot: your AI pair programmer”. It did not invent it: Codota’s homepage already read “Your AI Pair Programmer” in a Wayback capture of 15 June 2017. The critique comes from inside the practice. Birgitta Böckeler wrote on martinfowler.com on 10 August 2023: “The framing of coding assistants as pair programmers is a disservice to the practice”. Microsoft’s agent announcement of 19 May 2025 says the agent “levels up GitHub Copilot from a pair programmer to peer”.
On the ladder, pairing is Level 2: Dan Shapiro writes, “You are pairing with the AI like a colleague.” Our reading: the human reads every suggestion as it appears, which is the opposite end of review from vibe coding. See the AI pair programming glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: The human drives and the AI suggests; the human reads every suggestion.
Which names describe lifecycles and methods?
Section titled “Which names describe lifecycles and methods?”Seven names describe how work moves from intent to release, from a vendor’s lifecycle to a one-person loop.
What is agentic software development?
Section titled “What is agentic software development?”Forrester’s Diego Lo Giudice, on 8 June 2026: “The new norm is agentic software development, where autonomous agents collaborate across the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC), toward more end-to-end automation.” No single coiner is established. Microsoft wrote of “agentic DevOps” on 19 May 2025, and Hassan et al. of “Agentic Software Engineering (SE 3.0)” on 7 September 2025. Forrester puts vibe coding at the front of the lifecycle, not in place of it: “Product managers/owners vibe prototypes and features for the rest of the team to productize.” Our reading: the same agents at the opposite scope, a single person’s session that ends when “it mostly works” (Karpathy) against an organisation’s lifecycle that ends at a release with gates. See the agentic software development glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: Agents across the lifecycle; pipelines, other agents and humans at gates.
What are the agentic SDLC and the AI SDLC?
Section titled “What are the agentic SDLC and the AI SDLC?”Anthropic’s AI-native SDLC playbook (Louis Claxton, 21 August 2026) treats the labels as one thing: “You’ll also hear this shift called the agentic SDLC, the AI SDLC, or simply agentic software development — the labels differ, but they describe the same thing.” This page keeps agentic software development as its own entry because it has its own glossary page. The playbook’s definition: “The AI-native SDLC is a reimagined process that combines the old control objectives with new enforcement. Instead of a linear flow, the process becomes a loop, and AI is embedded at each point.” Nobody owns the label; Gartner’s abstract of 23 June 2026 speaks of leaders who “transition to an agentic SDLC”.
GEICO’s Jet Anderson, writing about vibe-coded applications in a post updated on 2 June 2026: “The failure is not that security tools did not catch the bugs. The failure is that nobody ran any security tools at all.” Our reading: vibe coding has no stages and no gates, and the agentic SDLC is the gates. This site’s AI-native lifecycle guide lays out six stages, each committing an artifact. See the AI SDLC glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: Agents write the first pass at each stage; humans own the gates.
What is AI-DLC?
Section titled “What is AI-DLC?”AI-DLC is a named methodology from AWS. Raja SP introduced it on 31 July 2025: “This is why we’re introducing the AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC), a new methodology designed to fully ingrain AI capabilities into the very fabric of software development.” It replaces sprints with “bolts” measured in hours or days and epics with Units of Work. AWS’s 2025 description has three phases (Inception, Construction, Operations); the open-source workflow in awslabs/aidlc-workflows has five phases and 33 stages (README of v2.11.0, read on 10 October 2026).
AWS does not use the words “vibe coding” in any of its three AI-DLC posts (searched on 10 October 2026). Its nearest contrast is with “AI-autonomous development, where AI is expected to generate entire applications without human intervention”, and its open-source announcement of 29 November 2025 says the mob rituals “ensure that AI’s suggestions are not blindly accepted”. Our reading: AI-DLC is built to stop the “accept all” habit that defines vibe coding. See the AI-DLC glossary page and this site’s AI-DLC comparison.
Who writes the code, who checks it: AI writes after the plan is approved; the team validates in mob sessions.
What is AI-native development (AI-native engineering)?
Section titled “What is AI-native development (AI-native engineering)?”Tessl’s Guy Podjarny popularised it for software on 6 July 2024: “We’re looking to define a new software development paradigm, AI Native Software Development, in which AI is built-in, not bolted on.” Patrick Debois systematised it in “The 4 patterns of AI Native Dev” (19 March 2025); he did not coin it. Gartner adopted “AI-native software engineering” in a press release of 1 July 2025. OpenAI’s AI-native team guide (PDF last modified 20 November 2025) puts the roles this way: “The agent becomes the first-pass implementer; the engineer becomes the reviewer, editor, and source of direction.”
The label proves little by itself. Nearform’s Cian Clarke, on Tessl’s blog (6 January 2026): “Many companies think enabling Copilot means they’re doing AI-native engineering. It doesn’t work that way.” Shapiro puts “90% of ‘AI-native’ developers” at Level 2. Our reading: AI-native is a property of a team’s process and vibe coding is one person’s review habit, so an AI-native team can vibe-code a prototype and still ship through gates. See the AI-native development glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: Agents implement first; engineers own review and merge.
What is AI-driven development?
Section titled “What is AI-driven development?”It is a generic adjective with no owner and no canonical definition, and Wikipedia has no article for it (checked via its API on 10 October 2026). The strongest anchor is AWS’s methodology name, AI-DLC, from 31 July 2025. AWS’s post splits the field in three: “AI-assisted development, where AI enhances specific tasks”, “AI-autonomous development”, and its own third way, in which “AI systematically creates detailed work plans, actively seeks clarification and guidance, and defers critical decisions to humans.” McKinsey also writes of “AI-driven software development” in a 3 November 2025 article that advises: “Avoid weak proxies like the percentage of code generated by AI, which offer little insight into real productivity.”
No source contrasts it with vibe coding. Our reading: “AI-driven” says who leads, and vibe coding says whether anyone reads. A team can be AI-driven and disciplined, or AI-driven and careless, and the word alone does not tell a CTO which. See the AI-driven development glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: AI leads; the term names no checker.
What is spec-driven development?
Section titled “What is spec-driven development?”No single coiner is established for the AI era. The phrase has academic prior art in a 2004 paper by Ostroff, Makalsky and Paige. In the AI era, Kiro used it on 14 July 2025 and GitHub’s Spec Kit followed on 2 September 2025. Birgitta Böckeler’s definition (15 October 2025): “Spec-driven development means writing a ‘spec’ before writing code with AI (‘documentation first’). The spec becomes the source of truth for the human and the AI.”
The vendors that launched the term set it against vibe coding. GitHub: “This ‘vibe-coding’ approach can be great for quick prototypes, but less reliable when building serious, mission-critical applications or working with existing codebases.” Our reading: they position it as the step after vibe coding, not its enemy. This site’s spec-driven development guide is stricter than the industry definition: one authoritative spec.md, with a spec delta in every behaviour-changing pull request. See the spec-driven development glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: Agents write; humans review the spec, plan and tasks; tests guard the result.
What is compound engineering?
Section titled “What is compound engineering?”Kieran Klaassen of Every named it on 18 August 2025, first as “compounding engineering”: “building self-improving development systems where each iteration makes the next one faster, safer, and better.” Dan Shipper co-wrote the 11 December 2025 article, by which time it was called compound engineering; he did not coin the term. The core idea: “each unit of engineering work should make subsequent units easier—not harder.”
Every does not set it against vibe coding. Its guide (undated; the same section appears in the 2025 article) gives vibe coding a place inside the system: “Vibe code to discover what you want, then spec to build it properly.” Our reading: vibe coding optimises the current change, and compound engineering optimises the next one by writing each lesson into files the next run reads. See this site’s compound engineering guide and the compound engineering glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: Agents write; review agents check, then a human.
How do prompt, context and harness engineering stack under the work?
Section titled “How do prompt, context and harness engineering stack under the work?”Alexey Grigorev’s July 2026 taxonomy gives each layer its own question: “Prompt engineering - what we say when we interact with the agent”, “Context engineering - what the agent knows before it starts”. Its remaining layers are loop engineering and graph engineering. Our reading: harness engineering asks what constrains and checks the agent.
What is prompt engineering?
Section titled “What is prompt engineering?”No single coiner is established. OpenAI’s CLIP paper, submitted 26 February 2021, already refers to “the ‘prompt engineering’ discussion around GPT-3”. Karpathy’s 24 January 2023 post made the idea popular: “The hottest new programming language is English”. OpenAI’s documentation defines it as “the process of writing effective instructions for a model, such that it consistently generates content that meets your requirements.” Gartner’s summary of 28 July 2025 framed it as displaced: “Context engineering is in, and prompt engineering is out.”
No source sets it against vibe coding. Our reading: they sit on different axes. Prompt engineering is about the quality of the input; vibe coding is the absence of review of the output. A prompt that names its own check stops being vibe coding. See the prompt engineering glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: The model writes from the prompt; the human reads the output.
What is context engineering?
Section titled “What is context engineering?”Tobi Lütke and Andrej Karpathy popularised it; neither coined it. Ankur Goyal used it on 20 April 2025, and Cognition’s Walden Yan on 12 June 2025. Lütke, 19 June 2025: “I really like the term ‘context engineering’ over prompt engineering. It describes the core skill better: the art of providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by the LLM.” Karpathy, 25 June 2025: “+1 for ‘context engineering’ over ‘prompt engineering’.” Anthropic’s definition (29 September 2025): “the set of strategies for curating and maintaining the optimal set of tokens (information) during LLM inference”.
Sources disagree on the relationship to prompting. Anthropic calls context engineering “the natural progression of prompt engineering”; LangChain argues “prompt engineering is a subset of context engineering”. The nearest contrast with vibe coding is Thoughtworks’ sponsored piece in MIT Technology Review (5 November 2025): “the transition from vibe coding to what’s being termed context engineering shows that while the work of human developers is evolving, they nevertheless remain absolutely critical.” Our reading: vibe coding curates nothing, while context engineering curates what the agent reads and says nothing about reviewing what it writes. See the context engineering glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: The agent writes; the term is silent on checking.
What is harness engineering?
Section titled “What is harness engineering?”In the earliest use of the exact phrase the research found, Mitchell Hashimoto wrote on 5 February 2026: “I’ve grown to calling this ‘harness engineering.’ It is the idea that anytime you find an agent makes a mistake, you take the time to engineer a solution such that the agent never makes that mistake again.” He added: “I don’t need to invent any new terms here; if another one exists, I’ll jump on the bandwagon.” Six days later an OpenAI post by Ryan Lopopolo put the phrase in its title and the term spread; Wikipedia records the attribution as contested. LangChain’s definition (11 March 2026): “A harness is every piece of code, configuration, and execution logic that isn’t the model itself.”
The OpenAI post describes the job: “a software engineering team’s primary job is no longer to write code, but to design environments, specify intent, and build feedback loops that allow Codex agents to do reliable work.” Our reading: harness engineering replaces reading the output with automated checks. Context engineering decides what the agent sees; harness engineering decides what checks and constrains it. Böckeler nests harness inside context engineering (2 April 2026), while Wikipedia’s “Agent harness” article puts context engineering inside the harness; neither nesting is settled. Dex Horthy argues it is not enough (22 July 2026): “no amount of harness engineering or loopsmaxxing can solve what is fundamentally a model-training issue.” See the harness guide and the harness engineering glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: The agent writes; mechanical checks and agent reviewers check.
How do coding agents, agentic workflows and orchestration relate?
Section titled “How do coding agents, agentic workflows and orchestration relate?”Anthropic’s definitions of 19 December 2024 give the topology: “Workflows are systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths.” Agents “dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage”. Our reading: orchestration is the third step, several agents coordinated by a lead agent or a script.
What are AI coding agents?
Section titled “What are AI coding agents?”It is a tool category with no coiner. Willison’s guide defines it plainly: “What are coding agents? They’re agents that can both write and execute code.” (chapter undated; the guide started on 23 February 2026). Vendors rename the category: GitHub’s changelog of 1 April 2026 says “Copilot cloud agent (formerly known as Copilot coding agent)”. On this site’s tool comparison, Cursor, Claude Code and Codex are coding agents that run the same loop: read the codebase, plan a multi-file change, edit files, run the project’s checks and retry until they pass. The feature matrix shows all three with subagents, worktrees, skills, hooks, MCP, a headless mode, an SDK and scheduled runs (Claude Code and Codex cells checked on 26 September 2026, Cursor cells on 28 August 2026).
Willison’s contrast, from the same guide: “Vibe coding is more useful in its original definition - we need a term to describe unreviewed, prototype-quality LLM-generated code that distinguishes it from code that the author has brought up to a production ready standard.” Our reading: a coding agent is the tool, and vibe coding is one way of using it. See the AI coding agents glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: The agent writes; its own test runs check, then a human.
What are agentic workflows?
Section titled “What are agentic workflows?”Andrew Ng popularised the phrase in March 2024; no source shows he coined it. His letter of 20 March 2024 says “agent workflows”. The 27 March 2024 letter is the first to use and define the phrase: “Instead of having an LLM generate its final output directly, an agentic workflow prompts the LLM multiple times, giving it opportunities to build step by step to higher-quality output.” It is wider than software development, and coding agents are one application of it. Do not confuse it with GitHub’s product, GitHub Agentic Workflows, in technical preview from 13 February 2026.
No source contrasts it with vibe coding, and Ng’s letters predate that term. Our reading: an agentic workflow moves the checking into the loop (reflection, tests), while vibe coding removes the human check after the loop. See the agentic workflows glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: The model iterates; reflection, tests or a critic agent check.
What is agent orchestration (multi-agent development)?
Section titled “What is agent orchestration (multi-agent development)?”“Orchestration” is an old systems word, and no single coiner is established for the agent sense. Ng’s 17 April 2024 letter lists multi-agent collaboration as a design pattern. Anthropic’s research-system post of 13 June 2025 describes “an orchestrator-worker pattern, where a lead agent coordinates the process while delegating to specialized subagents that operate in parallel”, and cautions that “most coding tasks involve fewer truly parallelizable tasks than research”. Per this site’s feature matrix, Claude Code, Codex and Cursor all have subagents (checked on 26 September 2026 for Claude Code and Codex, 28 August 2026 for Cursor).
One orchestrator’s author links it to vibe coding directly. Steve Yegge on Gas Town, in Welcome to Gas Town (1 January 2026): “It’s also 100% vibe coded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to, which might give you pause.” Our reading: orchestration multiplies whatever review discipline the human has. With a judge, tests and a merge gate it is a software factory; without them it is vibe coding at fleet scale. Orchestration is not the opposite of vibe coding, verification is. See orchestration patterns and the agent orchestration glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: Worker agents write; a judge agent and deterministic checks, then the human at merge.
Why is AI engineering a different job from all of these?
Section titled “Why is AI engineering a different job from all of these?”The trap in this vocabulary is a name that sounds like the rest and means something else.
What is AI engineering?
Section titled “What is AI engineering?”swyx (Shawn Wang) popularised the role in “The Rise of the AI Engineer” on 30 June 2023: “The emerging (and least cringe) version of this role seems to be: AI Engineer.” He did not start it: “I am calling attention to this trend rather than starting it.” Chip Huyen’s O’Reilly book, first released on 4 December 2024, defines the field as “the process of building applications with readily available foundation models”. So AI engineering is a job about what gets built: AI inside the product.
The loose sense is the trap. Every’s Klaassen used “AI engineering” on 18 August 2025 to mean AI-assisted coding: “Typical AI engineering is about short-term gains. You prompt, it codes, you ship.” Our reading, since no source compares the two: AI engineering describes what is built, and agentic engineering describes how any software gets built with agents. They overlap only when an AI engineer uses coding agents, and a vibe coder may build an app with no AI inside it. See the AI engineering glossary page.
Who writes the code, who checks it: Human engineers write; evaluation pipelines check the product.
Where does vibe coding sit on the autonomy ladder?
Section titled “Where does vibe coding sit on the autonomy ladder?”Dan Shapiro’s ladder does not say. His post of 23 January 2026 never uses the word “vibe”, Simon Willison’s write-up of 28 January does not either, and Karpathy’s Sequoia Ascent page never mentions levels or the dark factory (full-text checks on 10 October 2026). The placement below is our analysis, built from the nearest primary sources.
| Source | What it says | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Karpathy, original post | “I ‘Accept All’ always, I don’t read the diffs anymore.” Its stop condition: “it mostly works” | 2 Feb 2025 |
| Simon Willison, on the Level 5 team | A team “implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks at the code the coding agents are producing” (source) | 7 Feb 2026 |
| StrongDM, the team Willison names | “Code must not be reviewed by humans”; validation uses scenarios “often stored outside the codebase (similar to a ‘holdout’ set in model training)”, and “We use the term satisfaction to quantify this validation” (source) | 6 Feb 2026 |
| Simon Willison | “as the coding agents get more reliable, I’m not reviewing every line of code that they write anymore, even for my production level stuff.” (source) | 6 May 2026 |
Our reading: vibe coding and Level 5 share one trait, that no human reads the diff. They differ in what replaces the reader. In vibe coding nothing does; the human watches behaviour until “it mostly works”. At Level 5 a machine-checkable verification layer does: held-out scenarios and a satisfaction score. Vibe coding is a Level 5 workflow with the oracle removed. Willison’s 2026 remark that the two “have started to blur” is the same point from the other side: the boundary is not whether anyone reads, it is what replaced the reading.
Two of the 21 names map onto the ladder directly. AI pair programming is the Level 2 rung, and agentic engineering is the discipline that earns each step above it (our reading). The ladder’s destination, the software factory, is Level 5, covered in Level 5: you run the software factory and on the software factory glossary page.
Copy-paste prompts for placing your own work on this map
Section titled “Copy-paste prompts for placing your own work on this map”Run these against a repository you ship from. Each works unchanged in Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, and each ends with a report you verify by opening three of the files or pull requests it cites.
What breaks when a team renames vibe coding?
Section titled “What breaks when a team renames vibe coding?”These are our analysis of failure patterns, not measured rates. Each has a recovery step.
- Renaming vibe coding as agentic engineering without adding checks. The new name changes what the work is called, not what happens to the diff. The OpenSSF glossary (last modified 20 March 2026) draws the line on review: “If there is human review of the AI-generated code, then it is not vibe coding.” A team that accepts every agent change unread is vibe coding whatever its policy says. Karpathy’s published transcript is blunt about the standard: “You are not allowed to introduce vulnerabilities because of vibe coding.” Recovery: write the check that would fail when the code is wrong before you rename the loop.
- Adopting a lifecycle’s rituals without its verification. AWS describes the failure its rituals exist to prevent: “Developers, excited by automation, often drift into passive execution—allowing AI to ‘decide everything.’” Bolts and Units of Work are vocabulary; the Mob Elaboration and Mob Construction sessions are where suggestions are not blindly accepted. The same holds for an AI SDLC diagram: stages without gates are labels. Recovery: name the gate and the person who owns it for every stage.
- Treating the boundary as fixed. On 6 May 2026 Willison wrote: “Weirdly though, those things have started to blur for me already, which is quite upsetting.” and “There’s an element of the normalization of deviance here”. A team that reads fewer lines each month without adding checks drifts toward vibe coding while keeping its vocabulary. Recovery: record, for each loop, what replaced the reader: a test, a validator or a held-out scenario.
- Repeating a coinage claim the dates contradict. Zechner and Steinberger used “agentic engineering” before Karpathy endorsed it. Willison proposed “vibe engineering” after earlier uses. Goyal used “context engineering” before Lütke and Karpathy. Hashimoto disclaims coining “harness engineering”, and swyx says of AI engineering that he was “calling attention to this trend rather than starting it”. Recovery: write “popularised”, “endorsed” or “used”, and link the dated source.
- Reading “AI engineering” as engineering with AI. The role and the book mean building products on foundation models. A policy that says “AI engineering” must say which sense it means, because the two readers it addresses are different people.
Where to go next with the vibe coding vocabulary
Section titled “Where to go next with the vibe coding vocabulary”Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between vibe coding and agentic engineering?
Vibe coding means accepting AI-written code without reading it, a term Andrej Karpathy introduced on 2 February 2025. Agentic engineering uses the same kind of agents under a quality bar: on 4 February 2026 Karpathy called it his current favorite name for claiming the leverage of agents "without any compromise on the quality of the software". The difference is what checks the code, not which tool writes it.
Who coined vibe coding, and when?
Andrej Karpathy introduced it in an X post timestamped 2 February 2025. Simon Willison's own write-up gives the date as 6 February, but the post and Merriam-Webster's etymology note both say 2 February. Collins Dictionary named vibe coding its Word of the Year for 2025.
Who coined agentic engineering?
No single coiner is established. Mario Zechner used the phrase on 2 June 2025 and Peter Steinberger titled a post with it on 14 October 2025. Andrej Karpathy endorsed it as "personally my current favorite" on 4 February 2026, and on 23 February 2026 Simon Willison wrote that it was "coming out on top".
Is AI engineering the same as agentic engineering?
No. swyx popularised the AI engineer role in June 2023, and Chip Huyen defines AI engineering as building applications on foundation models. Agentic engineering is building any software with coding agents. The two overlap only when an AI engineer uses coding agents. That contrast is this site's analysis, because no source compares the two directly.
Where does vibe coding sit on the autonomy ladder?
Dan Shapiro's ladder does not place it; his post never uses the word. Our reading is that vibe coding shares Level 5's trait that no human reads the diff, but nothing replaces the reader, while at Level 5 a machine-checkable verification layer does.