Technology
Claude Code and the Great Productivity Panic of 2026
AI coding agents promised to make software development easier. Instead they’ve kicked off a high-pressure race to build at any cost.
“Vibe coding” was supposed to be chill. The former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy injected the term into the cultural lexicon in February 2025 to describe a new kind of programming, where engineers could build stuff by simply chatting with artificial intelligence models. It was software development, he said, “where you fully give in to the vibes.”
But one year later, the vibes, as they say, are off.