Karpathy Called Vibe Coding 'Passé' — Here's What He Replaced It With, and Why It Matters for Your Workflow

On April 1, 2026 — not a joke, he was direct about that — Andrej Karpathy posted that vibe coding is 'passé' and introduced what he called 'agentic engineering' as the paradigm that replaces it. This is significant for two reasons. First, Karpathy coined vibe coding in February 2023 — watching the author of a movement declare it outdated is rare and worth examining carefully. Second, his description of agentic engineering is a precise and useful specification of what expert AI-assisted development actually looks like right now, which means it's the most accurate map we have of where the field is heading. The short version of his framing: vibe coding is casual, exploratory, and human-steered; agentic engineering is deliberate, systematic, and human-architected but AI-executed. Vibe coding is what you do when you're prototyping alone on a weekend. Agentic engineering is what you do when you're building software that has to work reliably at scale. Karpathy's argument is that the tools are now capable enough that the casual framing does them a disservice — and that developers who treat AI assistants as casual autocomplete are leaving most of the capability on the table. This post breaks down exactly what he means, what it looks like in practice, and what it means for your workflow.