Why Vibe Coding is Dying ! | Andrej Karpathy

So I would say vibe coding is about raising the floor for everyone in terms of what they can do in software. The floor rises, everyone can vibe code anything, and that's amazing, incredible. But then I would say agentic engineering is about preserving the quality bar of what existed before in professional software. You're not allowed to introduce vulnerabilities due to vibe coding. You're still responsible for your software just as before, but can you go faster? And spoiler is you can, but how do you do that properly? To me, agentic engineering, I call it that because I do think it's kind of like an engineering discipline. You have these agents, which are these spiky entities, they're a bit fallible, a little bit stochastic, but they are extremely powerful. And it's how do you coordinate them to go faster without sacrificing your quality bar? Doing that well and correctly is the realm of agentic engineering. So I kind of see them as different. One is about raising the floor, and the other is about extrapolating. And what I'm seeing, I think, is there is a very high ceiling on agentic engineering capability. People used to talk about the 10x engineer previously. I think that this is magnified a lot more. 10x is not the speed up you gain. I think it does seem to me like people who are very good at this peak a lot more than 10x from my perspective right now.

I mean I think it's just trying to get the most out of the tools that are available, utilizing all of their features, investing into your own setup. Just like previously, all the engineers are used to basically getting the most out of the tools you use. Either it's vim or VS Code or now it's Claude Code or Codex or so on. So just investing into your setup and utilizing a lot of the tools that are available to you. And I think it just kind of looks like that. I do think that maybe a related thought is a lot of people are maybe hiring for this, right? Because they want to hire strong agentic engineers. I do think that what I'm seeing is that most people are still not refactored their hiring process for agentic engineering capability. If you're giving out puzzles to solve then this is still the old paradigm. I would say that hiring has to look like give me a really big project and see someone implement that big project. Let's write say a Twitter clone for agents and then make it really good, make it really secure and then have some agents simulate some activity on this Twitter. And then I'm going to use 10 Codex 5.4X high to try to break your website deployed and they're going to try to basically break it and they should not be able to break it. And so maybe it looks like that. Watching people in that setting and building some bigger projects and utilizing the tooling is maybe what I would look at for the most part.