"I propose we call this vibe engineering, with my tongue only partially in my cheek.
One of the lesser spoken truths of working productively with LLMs as a software engineer on non-toy-projects is that it’s difficult. There’s a lot of depth to understanding how to use the tools, there are plenty of traps to avoid, and the pace at which they can churn out working code raises the bar for what the human participant can and should be contributing.
The rise of coding agents—tools like Claude Code (released February 2025), OpenAI’s Codex CLI (April) and Gemini CLI (June) that can iterate on code, actively testing and modifying it until it achieves a specified goal, has dramatically increased the usefulness of LLMs for real-world coding problems.
I’m increasingly hearing from experienced, credible software engineers who are running multiple copies of agents at once, tackling several problems in parallel and expanding the scope of what they can take on. I was skeptical of this at first but I’ve started running multiple agents myself now and it’s surprisingly effective, if mentally exhausting!
This feels very different from classic vibe coding, where I outsource a simple, low-stakes task to an LLM and accept the result if it appears to work."
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/
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