Vibe Coding Is Eating Software Development - And Not Everyone Is Happy

Andrej Karpathy coins a term on X in February 2025. The post gets 4.5 million views. By March, Merriam-Webster adds it as a slang entry. By November, Collins Dictionary names it Word of the Year . By January 2026, MIT Technology Review lists generative coding as a 2026 Breakthrough Technology . By February 2026, Karpathy himself says the term is already "passe" and introduces "agentic engineering" as the next evolution. That is a fast arc for a concept that started as a casual post about accepting AI output without reading the diffs. Here is my take: vibe coding is real, it is useful, and the people most upset about it are largely upset for the wrong reasons. What Vibe Coding Actually Is The original definition from Karpathy is blunt: you describe what you want, the AI generates code, and you "forget that the code even exists." You accept output without reviewing it, nudge it with follow-up prompts, and ship when it works. Simon Willison drew a line that I think matters more than the h