Karpathy Says Vibe Coding Is Passé — Here's What Replaced It

In early April 2026, Andrej Karpathy — the person who coined the term 'vibe coding' in February 2025 — publicly declared it passé. That's a remarkable 14-month arc: from inventing a term that swept the developer world to retiring it. But Karpathy isn't saying AI-assisted coding is over. He's saying the mental model that made 'vibe coding' accurate has been superseded by something more rigorous. The successor paradigms he's pointing to — agentic engineering and context engineering — represent a maturation of the practice, not an abandonment of it. For anyone who has built their workflow around vibe coding, or who is teaching it, this shift requires updating how you think about the discipline. Here's a precise account of what changed, what Karpathy is actually pointing at, and what it means for your practice in April 2026.