Vibecoding, as popularized by Andrej Karpathy, is a tricky word.

It has incredible semantic fit - the second you hear it, you understand what it means. That makes it sticky. But it’s also dismissive - Oh they’re just vibecoding, you can feel the dismissiveness built into the structure of the word. I think it’s too late for a different word, “agentic coding” is too boring and corporate. Vibecoding as a word is in the lexicon.

However, we need to reclaim the felt meaning of the word. Vibecoding is the future of software engineering. The success of a software engineer will increasingly come down to how many effective token/second they can bring to bear on a problem.

Humans are inherently limited in their output. Single LLM agents are as well, since they are sequential token stream and can only move as fast as token inference. That’s why you eventually have to run multiple token streams (aka multiple agents, claude code instances).

The word effective is critical here - if you’re moving in the wrong direction, to the wrong goal, it doesn’t matter how many tokens you spent building it you’re wasting your time. However, wasted time can still be worthwhile, if important lessons are learned.

A good software engineer of January 2026 runs 1-10 agents at a time. The software engineer of June 2026 runs 10-100. Will we still call them a “vibecoder” when they’re managing hundreds of agents? Who knows.

If we are we need to work on normalizing the term, so it’s not a dirty word, its a mark of honor similar to “hacker” of the 90’s.