[Opinion] From conversational programming to vibe coding
What was Conversational Programming (2016), became Prompt Engineering (2022-2023), became CHOP (2023), and has now somehow become "Vibe Coding" (2025). The problem with that latest term is that it completely misdescribes what is actually happening.
The real shift is "human writes code" to "human manages systems that generate code". In other words, the job is not writing code, the job is managing machines that write code.
In practice, what this work involves is managing and coordinating systems of AI agents to produce the thing we want. Very little of that looks like "writing instructions", and even less of it involves operating on a sense of mood or general "vibes". Which is why I really dislike the term (along with its overtone of new age).
If we look at the words themselves ... Vibe: the overall mood or energy you sense from a place, person or situation (it's all about the vibes man, groovy). Coding: the act of writing instructions for a computer. ... then neither of those actually describes the work done.
What we are actually doing is managing, handling and controlling systems of AI agents in order to build the thing we are after. This is why (as I've said many times before), I would have preferred us to use the term AI wrangling because it combines ... AI: the ability of computers or machines to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. Wrangling: managing, handling or controlling something that is difficult to organise or control. This includes understanding i.e. the chain of comprehension for what is created.
That is a far more accurate description of the job to be done. If we had adopted that framing then it would have been much easier to explain to engineers what skills are needed, and much easier to explain to executives why this matters.
In other words ... Software Engineer to Vibe coder feels like the trivialisation of a field and a career dead end. Software Engineer to AI wrangler shows a promising future and it's a more accurate description of what we need.
It would also leave far less wriggle room for the "the end is nigh for coding" brigade of thought-leaderers. Instead of endless comparisons of AI vs human code writing, and the recurring question of whether we need coders at all, we could focus on the real change i.e. the increasing importance of people who know how to manage and control systems that generate software. That last bit also requires the practices to co-evolve, to emerge and to mature.
Everyone (and I mean everyone) that I know who works with agents at scale understands how brittle these systems are and how much wrangling is involved. If you're not seeing this then frankly, either you've not been running at scale for any length of time or you're selling snake oil.
Grumble, grumble.
Anyway, there's no way of winning that battle and we're just stuck with this bloody awful vibe coding term. I wish we weren't.
Have some AI generated slop to illustrate the point.
Originally published on LinkedIn.