Vibe coding: the end of an era, the return of discipline
Andrej Karpathy, the very person who popularised the term in early 2025, has just said it without hedging: “vibe coding” is on its way out. We are leaving the era of informal, AI-assisted coding and entering a more demanding discipline, agent engineering. Beyond developers, this shift tells us something far broader.
Vibe coding, symptom of an era
Vibe coding means accepting AI-generated code without really understanding how it works, by feel. Appealing for prototyping, inadequate for production. Karpathy admits as much: agents remain stochastic, fallible, ill-suited to critical systems. What raises everyone’s baseline is not enough to meet the standards of a profession.
From the informal to the disciplined
What replaces vibe coding is not less AI, but more method. Agent engineering preserves quality requirements while accelerating delivery. Above all, it redefines the role of the human: to them belong direction, specification, taste, coherence; to the agents, the implementation details. Karpathy describes these agents as a kind of superpowered intern: remarkable, yet requiring human judgement at every step.
What this says about your transformation
Replace “code” with “transformation,” and the picture is the same. Many organisations vibe-code their AI adoption: they stack tools by feel, seduced by the demo, with no clear direction or value set out. It impresses in a workshop. It does not hold up in production.
Maturity follows exactly the trajectory Karpathy describes: from fascination to discipline. Choosing the right answer according to context, risk and value (Sovereign, Standard, Tailored or Innovative) rather than reaching for an agent by default. Proving value before industrialising. Keeping the human in the driver’s seat, where discernment and meaning are decided.
The right intelligence, not the most fashionable
The underlying message is reassuring for anyone who thinks in terms of results: AI does not erase the demand for rigour, it relocates it. It amplifies judgement, it does not replace it. Feel gives way to method; and that is good news. Because a transformation, like serious software, is not improvised: it is designed, proven and embedded.
Source: Andrej Karpathy, at AI Ascent 2026, reported by Jade Emy. « Pourquoi le Vibe Coding est en voie de disparition… », Developpez.com, 22 mai 2026.