AI engineers declare vibe coding officially dead

The honeymoon is over for vibe coding. Swyx, the influential AI engineering thought leader, declared it dead just months after it began, tweeting "RIP vibe coding 2025-2025" as professional engineers revolt against the slop and security nightmares created by non-technical workers throwing half-baked AI prototypes over the wall. Meanwhile, he reveals code AGI will arrive in 20% of the time of full AGI while capturing 80% of its value, and agent labs like Cognition are now worth more than model labs as even OpenAI admits defeat on building products.

"RIP vibe coding 2025-2025" - Swyx declares it dead as engineers revolt against amateur code. Code AGI arrives 5x faster than regular AGI. OpenAI admits defeat on products.

Engineers revolt as vibe coding creates unfixable messes

Professional software engineers are reaching breaking point with vibe coding, the practice of using AI to generate code through natural language that exploded after Andrej Karpathy's February tweet.

Swyx explained the crisis: non-technical workers vibe code something in an hour, then dump it on engineers expecting "the full thing by Friday" without understanding they've only painted a superficial picture missing all the hard parts.

The infrastructure layers have specialized so completely for non-technical users that when handoff happens, engineers must rebuild everything from scratch because vibe coders use entirely different tech stacks than production systems.

The inter-engineer warfare is even worse. Some engineers vibe code irresponsibly, leaving security holes and unmaintainable messes for colleagues to clean up.

When LLMs hit rabbit holes which they frequently do engineers who don't understand the generated code can't debug it. They're "washing their hands" of responsibility while dumping broken pull requests on teammates.

The backlash is so severe that engineers are actively searching for vibe coding's replacement, with "spec-driven development" emerging as the leading candidate where humans maintain control and understanding rather than blindly trusting AI outputs.

The timing couldn't be worse for the vibe coding ecosystem. Claude Code launched in March and became a $600 million business, Cursor and Cognition reached unicorn status, but now their target market of professional developers is revolting. Swyx notes everyone he talks to is "sick and tired of vibe coding," with the term becoming synonymous with amateur hour and technical debt. The tools that democratized coding are now being blamed for destroying code quality across the industry, forcing a reckoning about whether making everyone a "coder" was actually a good idea.