AI that does not just answer — it plans, executes and checks its own work. Tools, workflows and the verification nobody talks about.
Andrej Karpathy coined the term in February 2025. Eighteen months later 92% of US developers work this way and 60% of new code is AI-generated. What vibe coding actually is, the four ways it changes your job, a ten-minute exercise to try it — and the three honest limits.
Ask a chatbot to fix a bug and it writes you a corrected function. Ask an agent and it edits the file, runs your tests and fixes the error it just caused. The difference explained with the 2026 tools — Antigravity 2.0 and Claude Code — plus the number nobody puts in the comparison table: 96% do not trust AI code, and only 48% always review it.