Agentic Engineering

The Spectrum: Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

Rather than treating vibe coding and agentic engineering as a binary, it is more useful to think of them as endpoints on a spectrum. The key differentiator is not whether you use AI, it’s how much structure, verification, and human judgment surrounds the AI’s output.

By early 2026, Karpathy, himself, acknowledged that the term vibe coding was too narrow, introducing the term “agentic engineering” to describe the more disciplined end of the spectrum:

A lot of people quote tweeted this as 1 year anniversary of vibe coding. Some retrospective -

I've had a Twitter account for 17 years now (omg) and I still can't predict my tweet engagement basically at all. This was a shower of thoughts throwaway tweet that I just fired off… https://t.co/yoJPmb1xuK
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) February 4, 2026

flowchart LR
    subgraph VC["🌊 Vibe Coding"]
        V1["Casual NL prompts"]
        V2["'Does it seem to work?'"]
        V3["Copy-paste errors to AI"]
        V4["Minimal code understanding"]
    end
    subgraph SAC["🔧 Structured AI-Assisted Coding"]
        S1["Detailed prompts with examples"]
        S2["Manual testing & spot-checking"]
        S3["Developer diagnoses root cause"]
        S4["Selective review of critical paths"]
    end
    subgraph AE["⚙️ Agentic Engineering"]
        A1["Formal specs, architecture docs"]
        A2["Automated test suites, CI/CD gates"]
        A3["Agents self-diagnose within bounds"]
        A4["Comprehensive architecture review"]
    end
    VC --> SAC --> AE

    style VC fill:#3d1a1a,stroke:#8a4a4a,color:#fff
    style SAC fill:#1a2a3d,stroke:#4a6a8a,color:#fff
    style AE fill:#1a3d1a,stroke:#4a8a4a,color:#fff

Figure 1: The Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering Spectrum

Difference between vibe coding and agentic engineering

The single biggest differentiator between the two ends is how outputs get verified. In vibe coding, verification is optional. In agentic engineering, two mechanisms work together:

Tests verify the deterministic parts: a function given this input produces that output.
Evals verify the non-deterministic parts: did the agent take the right trajectory, choose the right tools, and produce a response that meets the quality bar.

Without both, the practice is always vibe coding, regardless of how sophisticated the prompts are.

…WIP

= what is a well written eval suite? …

Why tests matter more than ever

https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/