Stop Vibe Coding (Do This Instead)

You're 200 prompts deep. The app was

supposed to take two hours, but it has

been 2 days. Something keeps breaking.

You fix one thing and something else

breaks [music] and you don't know why.

Because you didn't write any of it. If

you've built with AI, you know exactly

what that moment feels like. And here is

what nobody tells you about it. It is

not a tool problem. It is not bad luck.

It's actually the ceiling of vibe

coding. And almost [music]

everyone hits it. The guy who invented

this term already figured this out and

he just named what comes next. Once you

understand it, that ceiling disappears.

[music] So, VIP coding changed

everything. Andre Karpati coined the

term in early 2025. [music] The idea was

simple. Describe what you want, let AI

build it, and iterate by feeling. And

all of this without years of technical

training required. And it worked. A

[music] quarter of all startups in Y

Combinators 2025 batch had code bases

that were 95% AI generated. People were

shipping real products in days [music]

instead of months and that was genuinely

new. And if you started building this

way, you were on the right path. But VIP

coding was always the starting point and

not the destination. Here's what happens

when you treat it like a destination.

Every prompt you fire without a clear

plan [music]

adds something you don't fully

understand. And everything you don't

understand makes the next problem harder

to fix. [music] It compounds quietly

until suddenly nothing works and you

don't know where to start. Stack

Overflow surveyed 49,000 developers last

year. Trust in AI generated code dropped

from 40% to 29 in a single year. And

that is not coincidence. That's what

happens when people ship things and

discover the output isn't as solid as it

looks. The breaking apps, the features

that conflict with each other. The

project that felt fast at the [music]

start and then froze completely. That is

all the same problem you were describing

when you needed to be defining. Karpathi

posted just a few weeks ago that the

term he prefers now is agentic

engineering. He broke it down in two

parts. Agentic means you are not writing

code 99% of the time. You are directing

agents who do. Engineering means this is

a real skill, something with depth,

something you can actually get better

at. And the word that matters most is

directing. A prompter says, for example,

build me a user dashboard. A director

says, "Build me a dashboard that shows

these three metrics, pulls from this

data source, updates every 30 seconds

and shows a loading state while fetching

it." Both of them are using the same

tools, the same AI, but they have

completely different output because the

director knew exactly what they were

building before AI touched anything. And

that is the entire shift. Stop

describing and start defining. The vibe

coder works backwards from whatever the

AI produces. But the agentic engineer

works forwards from a clear picture of

exactly what they want and that one

difference changes everything about how

the build goes. So what it looks like in

practice, this is not a coding skill,

it's a thinking skill and it comes down

to three habits. The first is defining

the output before you open the tool.

It's not the feature, the outcome. What

do we actually want to have at the end?

So, what does this do for the person

using it? What does success actually

look like? When you can answer that in

just two sentences, your prompts become

10 times more precise. The second one is

giving the AI one job at a time. VIP

coders often try to build everything

[music] in just like one big prompt.

Well, Agentic engineers break the build

into small, clear steps. First, build

the login flow. then build the

dashboard, [music] then connect them.

Each step is small enough that you can

verify it worked before moving to the

next one. The third is reviewing before

moving on. Just actually testing what

you just built before prompting the

[music] next step. That one habit alone

eliminates most of the something broke

and I don't know where problem. So,

three habits, no extra tools, no coding

knowledge required. So, I am not a vibe

coder anymore. Not because vibe coding

was wrong. It was the right way to

start. But there's a version of this

that is faster, more reliable, and

honestly more enjoyable. Because you are

not hoping the AI gets it right. You are

defining what right looks like and

directing the AI to get there. The

people who build the most interesting

products in the next few years are not

going to be the best coders. They are

going to be the clearest thinkers.

people who can define what they want

with precision and direct AI to execute

it. That is agentic engineering. And the

gap between where you are right now and

that level is a lot closer than you

might think. So, if you've enjoyed this

video, make sure to like and subscribe.

A lot of more content like this is in

the pipeline. [music] And then we'll see

each other in my next