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Discussion on: From “Vibe Coding” to “Agentic Engineering”: When Coding Becomes Orchestrating Agents

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Artem Koltunov

The evolution from vibe coding to agentic engineering is real — Karpathy himself illustrated it. He coined "vibe coding" in February 2025, then declared it outdated and introduced "agentic engineering" a year later, and ultimately hand-coded his Nanochat project because agents "didn't work well enough at all." The trajectory is telling: generation speed isn't the bottleneck. Understanding is. In our experiments (25-40% gains with rigorous review), the biggest insight was that AI excels as an analysis tool — understanding unfamiliar code, comparing branches — more reliably than as a code generator. When you mention "orchestrating agents," do you see the orchestrator's primary job as directing generation, or as maintaining understanding of what agents produce?