From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering: What Changed and Why It Matters

February 7, 2026

A year ago, Andrej Karpathy — former Tesla AI director and OpenAI co-founder — posted a casual observation on X that would become the most talked-about term in software development. He called it "vibe coding": the practice of giving in to the vibes, talking to an AI, and forgetting the code even exists.

The term exploded. Collins Dictionary named it their 2025 Word of the Year. Searches spiked 6,700% in a single spring. Everyone from weekend hobbyists to Fortune 500 CTOs started throwing the phrase around.

And then Karpathy himself moved on.

His current term for what AI-assisted development has become? "Agentic engineering." And the distinction matters more than you might think.

What Vibe Coding Actually Was

Vibe coding was never really a methodology. It was a mood. You'd open Cursor or ChatGPT, describe what you wanted in plain English, and let the model generate code. If it broke, you'd paste the error back and say "fix it." The process was conversational, intuitive, and — for throwaway projects and weekend prototypes — genuinely fun.

Karpathy was upfront about the limitations from day one. In his original post, he described vibe coding as something for "fun throwaway projects, demos, and explorations." The LLMs at the time simply weren't reliable enough for anything production-grade.

The problem was that the industry didn't always hear the caveat. Companies started shipping vibe-coded software to production. And the cracks showed fast.

Why the Vibes Stopped Working

The numbers tell a blunt story. According to research cited across multiple industry analyses, 56% of developers reported that AI-generated code introduced security vulnerabilities into their projects. CodeRabbit's December 2025 study found that while AI accelerated initial development, much of that time was clawed back fixing downstream bugs.

And then there's the macro picture: American businesses are now sitting on an estimated $2.41 trillion in accumulated technical debt — a figure so large it dwarfs most national economies. Not all of that is AI-generated, but vibe-coded software contributes a growing share.

The core issue wasn't that AI wrote bad code. It's that nobody was engineering the process around it. Vibe coding was a single developer having a conversation with a single model. No testing pipeline. No security review. No architectural guardrails. What demos well is rarely what runs well in production.

Enter Agentic Engineering

Karpathy's distinction is precise. As he put it: "'Agentic' because the new default is that you are not writing the code directly 99% of the time — you are orchestrating agents who do and acting as oversight." And "'engineering' to emphasize that there is an art and science and expertise to it."

This isn't a rebranding exercise. The underlying workflow has fundamentally changed.

In agentic engineering, a developer doesn't chat with one AI assistant. They coordinate multiple specialized agents — one handling architecture, another writing tests, another reviewing security — working in parallel across a structured pipeline. The human role shifts from writing code to designing systems, setting constraints, and reviewing output.

Think of it as the difference between cooking a meal yourself with a recipe app versus running a professional kitchen. You're the head chef now. The AI agents are your line cooks. You design the menu, set the standards, and taste every dish before it goes out. But you're not personally chopping the onions anymore.

What This Means for Small Businesses

This shift carries real implications for companies that don't have massive engineering departments — which is to say, most businesses.

The Good News

Agentic engineering dramatically lowers the cost of building production-quality software. Early adopters are reporting 6-8x faster execution on complex development tasks and 20x throughput improvements with up to 91% error reduction compared to manual workflows. For a five-person company, this is the difference between "we can't afford to build that" and "we shipped it last week."

The Catch

You still need someone who understands engineering. The word "engineering" in agentic engineering isn't decorative. Someone has to design the agent workflows, set the quality gates, configure the testing pipelines, and — critically — know when the AI output is wrong.

This is where many businesses will stumble. The promise of vibe coding was that anyone could build software without technical expertise. The reality of agentic engineering is that technical expertise has become more valuable, not less. It's just applied differently — to orchestration and oversight rather than to writing individual lines of code.

The Opportunity

Small businesses that get this right gain a massive advantage. Industry data suggests organizations adopting agentic workflows are seeing measurable ROI within months, with 62% of enterprises expecting over 100% return on their agentic AI investments. For smaller, more agile companies, the returns can be even faster because there's less organizational friction in the way.

The BaristaLabs Perspective

We've been watching this transition closely because it mirrors exactly what we do for our clients. The companies that tried to vibe-code their way to a product and then called us to fix the result? That's become one of our most common engagements.

Our approach has always been engineering-first, AI-accelerated. We use agentic tools aggressively — parallel agent workflows, automated testing pipelines, continuous security review — but every system we build has human oversight baked into the architecture.

The takeaway for business owners is straightforward: AI hasn't made engineering expertise obsolete. It's made it more leveraged. One experienced engineer with the right agentic tools can now produce what used to require a team of ten. But zero engineers with an AI subscription will still produce zero reliable software.

The Bottom Line

Vibe coding was a useful on-ramp. It showed millions of people that building software with AI was possible, and it pushed the entire industry to take AI-assisted development seriously. But it was always the beginning of the story, not the end.

Agentic engineering is what happens when the novelty wears off and the real work begins. The tools are better. The processes are more structured. And the results — for the businesses willing to invest in getting it right — are dramatically better.

The question isn't whether to adopt AI in your development process. That ship has sailed. The question is whether you're still vibing or actually engineering.

Building with AI and want to make sure you're doing it right? Contact BaristaLabs to learn how we help small businesses adopt agentic engineering workflows.