Vibe Engineering, Disciplined AI Software Development

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy, former director of AI at Tesla and a prominent figure in the machine learning community, dropped a bombshell on Twitter that would reshape how millions of developers think about code. “There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding,'” he wrote, “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” The post ignited a firestorm. Within weeks, vibe coding became a cultural phenomenon, earning recognition on the Merriam-Webster website as a “slang & trending” term. By year's end, Collins Dictionary had named it Word of the Year for 2025. But here's the twist: whilst tech Twitter debated whether vibe coding represented liberation or chaos, something more interesting was happening in actual development shops. Engineers weren't choosing between intuition and discipline. They were synthesising them. Welcome to vibe engineering, a practice that asks a provocative question: what if the real future of software deve