Agentic engineering: Next big AI trend after vibe coding in 2026

In 2025, “vibe coding” dominated the AI landscape, a viral trend characterized by humans prompting AI to write code.

It was popularized by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy who took to X and coined the term vibe coding to describe the free-form and prompt-driven way of generating software with the help of AI.

Several types of AI models have enabled this intuitive and “vibe-driven” coding experience. Among the Large Language Models (LLMs), GPT-4, GPT-5 mini, LLMA 3 and Claude can understand natural language instructions and generate code across languages, such as JavaScript and Python,

Having specifically been trained on a large collection of code, Codex and AlphaCode understand coding patterns, libraries, and idiomatic solutions.

Recently released Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6 has taken the vibe coding to pro-level by introducing adaptive thinking, 1M token context, and agent teams.

Moving past the vibe coding era, a new term “agentic engineering” has emerged, having a potential to become the AI’s next big trend.

Taking to X, Andrej Karpathy posted, “"Many people have tried to come up with a better name for this to differentiate it from vibe coding, personally, my current favorite is 'agentic engineering.”

What is agentic engineering?

Agentic engineering marks a paradigm shift in how humans build software. Instead of writing the code, humans adopt the roles of architects and governors.

In this transition, human developers define the high-level goals, quality standards, and bottleneck and AI agents handle the code planning, processing and writing under supervision.

As per Karpathy’s definition, it comprises two parts: agentic in which agents are writing the code directly 99 percent of the time and you are responsible for supervising. The engineering part focuses on the fact that “there is an art & science and expertise to it.”

It means, one can learn and become better at, with its own depth of a different kind.

Difference between agentic engineering and vibe coding

The core idea of agentic engineering is based on designing systems where AI agents plan, reason, and execute tasks autonomously; vibe coding revolves around Writing code quickly with AI assistance based on intuition, prompts, and feel.

The primary goal of agentic engineering is building autonomous workflows and decision-making systems. The goal of vibe coding is rapid prototyping and fast feature creation.

Agentic engineering is more structured with defined goals, tools, workflows, and memory; vibe coding is more suitable for experimentation.

Humans role in agentic engineering will be architect and supervisor, setting rules and monitoring agents. In vibe coding, humans act as collaborators, guide AI through prompts and tweak outputs.

‘Software engineering is obsolete’

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cautioned that, “Software engineering will be completely obsolete in 6-12 months.

I think… I don’t know… we might be six to twelve months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs (software engineers) do end to end. Then it’s a question of how fast does that loop close.”

“In 2026, we're likely to see continued improvements on both the model layer and the new agent layer. I feel excited about the product of the two and another year of progress,” Karpathy added in the post.