Karpathy Names the Thing We've All Been Doing

Andrej Karpathy stood on stage at Sequoia Ascent 2026 and gave a name to what's been happening in our terminals since December: agentic engineering. Not vibe coding. Not prompt engineering. A distinct discipline where you don't write code 99% of the time. You orchestrate agents and act as oversight.

The full talk lays out a three-layer framework. Software 1.0 is handwritten code. Software 2.0 is neural networks trained on data. Software 3.0 is the context window itself becoming the program. Your CLAUDE.md files, your skill definitions, your memory systems, your structured examples. Those aren't configuration. They're source code for agent behavior.

I've been living this shift for months and the vocabulary matters more than you'd think. When I tell someone I'm doing "agentic engineering" instead of "vibe coding," the conversation changes immediately. Vibe coding is the floor. Everyone can build. Agentic engineering is the ceiling. Orchestrating agents who write code, with you as the quality gate.

The practical heuristic Karpathy offered is the one I keep coming back to: automate what you can verify. Tasks with automatic reward signals, things like math, coding with test suites, linting, type checking, improve rapidly because they're resettable and measurable. Before you delegate work to an agent, ask yourself: can I verify correctness automatically? If yes (test suite exists, type checker validates, CI passes), delegate aggressively. If no (design decisions, architecture choices, UX), keep human judgment in the loop.

He pinpoints December 2025 as the tipping point where agentic tools went from "helpful but messy" to consistently producing correct code. That tracks with my experience. Something changed around then. The failure rate dropped enough that I stopped double-checking routine implementations and started spending my time on architecture and taste.

The real implication for builders: invest in context architecture with the same rigor you invest in code architecture. What loads into the context window, when, in what order, with what priority. Version control it. Test it. Review it. The context IS the program now.

Source: Sequoia Ascent 2026 / Karpathy Blog