‘Vibe Coding’ Founder Andrej Karpathy Has A New Term For AI Coding

Last February, OpenAI’s co-founder and Tesla Autopilot’s founding engineer, Andrej Karpathy, accidentally named the now ubiquitous version. when he tweeted about “vibe coding.” The term describes a form of AI-assisted coding that lowered the barrier to entry into software engineering and quickly took both hobbyists and Silicon Valley by storm. To celebrate the one-year anniversary of that viral moment, Karpathy introduced a new, if somewhat ambiguous, term: “agent engineering.”

The difference? While coding vibe was for fun and powered by early AI coding tools, agent engineering represents a more advanced phase of software development that is increasingly common in work settings. The inclusion of the term “agent” makes sense because, for the most part, developers no longer write code directly. Instead, they direct and guide the agents in what they do, Karpathy said in a recent post on X. And “Engineering” emphasizes “that there is art and science and technology in it,” he explained.

Karpathy said he was surprised by the buzz his first vibe generated, calling it “a throwaway tweet that I just put out without thinking.” But the researcher’s famous work in the AI ​​industry gives his ideas added credibility. Internet searches for the term exploded last year, according to Google Trends, and the phenomenon was featured in many articles and think tanks. It was even named the Collins Dictionary word of the year 2025.

A member of OpenAI’s 11-person founding team, Karpathy focused on generative modeling, computer vision and reinforcement learning at maker ChatGPT before moving to Tesla in 2017 to lead its Autopilot efforts. Karpathy returned to OpenAI in 2023, then left again a year later to launch Eureka Labs, an AI education company. Besides AI development, he has over 1.2 million followers on YouTube, where he posts educational tutorials.

A lot has changed over the years. While vibe writing was originally aimed at developers experimenting with AI on weekend projects, Karpathy noted that large-scale language models (LLMs) have evolved so much that their use is now commonplace among professional developers. This is where mechanical engineering comes in. This approach aims to “seek benefits in the use of agents but without compromising on the quality of the software.”

The rapid evolution of AI-powered coding is not only reflected in new names, but in increased investment. Cursor, one of the startups at the heart of the vibe coding boom, raised $2.3 billion last November in a funding round that nearly tripled its valuation to $29.3 billion. Stockholm-based Lovable was valued at $6.6 billion the following month after raising $330 million. Replit, another major AI coding company, is reportedly approaching a new $400 million funding round that could push its valuation to $9 billion. These startups are now facing increasing competition from established AI developers such as Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which have doubled down on coding features in recent months.

Apart from his roles in major tech companies and his talent for viral buzzwords, Karpathy is also an active AI investor. He has backed 14 startups, according to Crunchbase, and has invested in companies that are building autonomous technology behind trends like agent engineering. That includes a 2024 funding round for /dev/agents, which is developing an application for AI agents, and a 2022 round for Adept, which is building assistants that can automate software workflows.