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Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit's High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison . Here are some of my highlights, including my disturbing realization that vibe coding and agentic engineering have started to converge in my own work. One thing I really enjoy about podcasts is that they sometimes push me to think out loud in a way that exposes an idea I've not previously been able to put into words. Vibe coding and agentic engineering are starting to overlap A few weeks after vibe coding was first coined I published Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks) , where I firmly staked out my belief that "vibe coding" is a very different beast from responsible use of AI to write code, which I've since started to call agentic engineering . When Joseph brought up the distinction between the two I had a sudden realization that they're not nearly as distinct for me as they used to be: Weirdly though, those things have started to blur for me already, which is quite upsetting. I thought we had a very clear delineation where vibe coding is the thing where you're not looking at the code at all. You might not even know how to program. You might be a non-programmer who asks for a thing, and gets a thing, and if the thing works, then great! And if it doesn't, you tell it that it doesn't work and cross your fingers. But at no point are you really caring about the code quality or any of those ad