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Vibe coding is irresponsibly building software through dice rolls, not caring what code is produced What about when engineers at the top of their game use AI tools responsibly to accelerate their work? I propose "vibe engineering"! simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/v...

We need to acknowledge that working effectively with AI programming tools is HARD - they're unintuitive, full of traps and can churn out huge volumes of bad code if you let them But they can also greatly amplify your existing programming expertise if you know how to wield them

Is the term "vibe engineering" kind of stupid, leaning into the gatekeeping distinction between "coders" and "real software engineers" It absolutely is. That's why I think it might stick!

try 'agentic engineering' which could be abbreviated to 'ageng' which I want to see a thousand text-to-speech and podcasters try to pronounce

I'd second that. When I spend hours writing that spec, there aren't many 'vibes' in it. AgEng sounds better to me 👍

I'd avoid "vibe" - as it's closely associated with vibe coding. I rather like @kentbeck.com' s use of "augmented" programming. Although the need for such a term won't last long as it becomes BAU.

The meaning of ‘vibe’ is as in “based on vibes” i.e. taking something’s surface appearance of working software as sufficient to use. If you were going to change the semantic character to not mean that kind of irresponsible inattentiveness, you’d change the 1st word of the pair not the 2nd

Augmented is a good word! Also amplified perhaps I want a hint at engineering over just programming though since there's a lot more to it than purely producing code, see notes here simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/v...