Vibe engineering is a term proposed by Simon Willison in October 2025 for the way seasoned software professionals use LLMs and coding agents to accelerate their work while staying “proudly and confidently accountable” for the software they produce. He framed it as the other end of the spectrum from Vibe Coding, which he characterised as the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI, entirely prompt-driven and with no attention to how the code works; vibe engineering, in his words, signals “a different, harder and more sophisticated way of working with AI tools to build production software”.
Usage
Willison introduced the term in Vibe engineering, describing iterating with coding agents towards production-quality, maintainable code — including running several agents in parallel — as a different process from outsourcing a low-stakes task and accepting whatever appears to work. He tied it to the claim that LLMs reward existing top-tier engineering practices (automated testing, planning, documentation, version control, automation, code review, manual QA, preview environments) and that AI tools amplify existing expertise.
He chose the name knowingly, calling it probably “a stupid name”, cheeky and likely to be controversial, and said he wanted to reclaim “vibes” for something more constructive. In an update dated 23 February 2026 he wrote that the term Agentic Engineering appeared to be coming out on top for the same idea.