A typical session: an engineer writes a short spec for a feature and hands it to a coding agent such as Claude Code or OpenAI Codex. The agent edits files, runs the tests, reads the failures and tries again. The engineer reviews the diff, asks for changes and decides when it is ready to merge. The agent does most of the typing; the engineer stays responsible for what ships.
The name gained attention in early 2026. Addy Osmani’s February 4 post attributes the suggestion to Andrej Karpathy, who had coined vibe coding the year before. On February 11, Simon Willison noted that he was seeing the term in several places, particularly from Karpathy and Osmani. Willison then built a guide around it, defining agentic engineering as developing software with the assistance of coding agents and naming code execution as the capability that makes it possible. These sources document that usage, rather than establish the phrase’s first use.
The difference from vibe coding is review and accountability, not how much code the AI writes. In vibe coding, as Karpathy originally described it, you stop paying attention to the code. In agentic engineering, the engineer specifies the problem, gives the agent the tools and tests it needs, and checks the result until it is credible. That is why the term travels with ideas like the agent harness and the software factory: the quality of the surrounding checks decides the quality of the output.
On Chain of Thought, the phrase so far appears in a sponsor read rather than a discussion: the Svix read in episode 78 at 51:48. Svix is the Season 4 presenting sponsor.
Sources
- Addy Osmani: Agentic Engineering — Dated February 4, 2026; says Andrej Karpathy suggested agentic engineering that week as a name for the professional, human-supervised counterpart to vibe coding, with specs, diff review and tests; checked October 24, 2026.
- Simon Willison: GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering — Notes the term showing up in several places, most notably from Andrej Karpathy and Addy Osmani, as a name for professional software engineers building with LLMs; checked October 24, 2026.
- Simon Willison: Writing about Agentic Engineering Patterns — Uses the term for building software with coding agents that can generate and execute code, and places it at the other end of the scale from vibe coding: professionals amplifying their existing expertise; checked October 24, 2026.
- Simon Willison: What is agentic engineering? — Defines the practice as developing software with the assistance of coding agents and calls code execution its defining capability; checked October 24, 2026.
