Anthropic's Boris Cherny Dislikes "Vibe Coding" Term for AI-Assisted Programming

Anthropic’s Boris Cherny has spent the past several months telling anyone who’ll listen that software engineering is a dying profession, that IDEs are next to go, and that at Anthropic—the company he helps run—no one has touched a line of code manually since at least November.

Now the Claude Code creator has a new grievance: the word everyone uses to describe what he actually does all day. Cherny told Business Insider on Wednesday, at Anthropic’s Code with Claude conference in San Francisco, that “vibe coding”—the term that has become shorthand for AI-assisted programming—is starting to grate on him. He’s already begun asking Claude for alternatives.

The word that stuck everywhere Boris Cherny didn’t want it to

“Vibe coding” was coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. It caught on fast. Collins Online Dictionary named it the word of the year in November. The problem, as Cherny sees it, is that “vibe” undersells what’s actually happening. Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex are now pulling in billions in revenue and producing millions of lines of production-grade code. Calling that vibe coding is, at this point, a bit like calling surgery “gut feeling medicine.” Claude suggested “agentic engineering”—another Karpathy coinage—but Cherny doesn’t think it has the same ring either. He hasn’t settled on anything yet and is actively crowdsourcing ideas, telling BI readers to route suggestions through the reporters covering the event, or just tweet them directly at him (@bcherny). He says if something’s good, he’ll use it.

Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, says coding is ‘solved,’ the vocabulary hasn’t caught up

The terminology debate is a small but telling symptom of a bigger shift. Cherny has said publicly that coding is “solved” for him personally. He ships 22 to 27 pull requests a day—all Claude-generated—and hasn’t manually written code since November. At Anthropic, Claude instances run in autonomous loops, talk to each other over Slack, and handle engineering tasks across teams with minimal human input. The rest of the industry is getting there. Google says 75% of its new code is now AI-generated. Meta has mandated that 65% of engineers in its creation org—the teams behind Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger—generate more than 75% of their committed code using AI in H1 2026. Amazon has rolled out Claude Code to every corporate employee through AWS Bedrock. Cherny’s thesis is that the engineer of the future is a “builder”—someone who decides what to make and directs AI to make it, rather than writing it out themselves. That’s a real paradigm shift. Whether the label that defines it is vibe coding, agentic engineering, or something nobody’s thought of yet, he’d rather get the name right.