Anthropic co-founder and Claude Code creator Boris Cherny has updated his perspective on the evolution of AI-driven development. Having previously proclaimed that "software engineering is dead," Cherny now asserts that the era of manual AI prompting is drawing to a close.

As reported by Business Insider, he argues that the industry's future belongs to loop engineering—a paradigm where AI agents autonomously generate and iterate on their own prompts. For context, loops are self-sustaining systems that direct AI agents to execute tasks without continuous human intervention. For example, a single command like /goal can mandate an AI model to work continuously until an objective is met, eliminating the need for step-by-step guidance.

Cherny explained: “It’s an agent that prompts Claude. I don’t write the prompt anymore. Claude writes the prompt, and now I’m talking to that new Claude that is coordinating.”

Addy Osmani, a director at Google Cloud, outlined that effective loops require five foundational elements: automations, worktrees, skills, plugins and connectors, and sub-agents.

Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw at OpenAI, told users: “You shouldn’t be prompting coding agents anymore. You should be designing loops that prompt your agents.”

Claire Vo, founder of ChatPRD, explained: “This is the time for the manager. You are designing a job. Just imagine you’re onboarding an employee — that employee could be an assistant, a customer service agent, or a software engineer.”

Practical examples of this architecture include:

• A primary agent writing code while a secondary agent independently reviews it.

• Codex maintaining active software repositories by waking up at five-minute intervals to organize and direct ongoing work into distinct threads.

Anthropic Co-Founder Boris Cherny on "Vibe Coding"

For the past several months, Anthropic’s Boris Cherny has consistently argued that traditional software engineering is a fading profession, that integrated development environments (IDEs) are the next to become obsolete, and that engineers at Anthropic have completely stopped writing manual code since late last year. Now, the Claude Code creator has a new target: the exact vocabulary used to describe his daily work. Cherny recently shared with Business Insider that "vibe coding"—the viral slang for AI-assisted programming—has begun to annoy him, prompting him to ask Claude for better alternatives.

The phrase "vibe coding" was originally coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 and spread rapidly, ultimately being named Word of the Year by Collins Online Dictionary in November. The issue, from Cherny's viewpoint, is that the term "vibe" trivializes the actual engineering taking place. Tools like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex are currently generating billions in revenue and delivering millions of lines of production-grade software. Equating that output to a mere vibe is, in his eyes, akin to calling complex surgery "gut-feeling medicine." While Claude proposed the term "agentic engineering"—another phrase coined by Karpathy—Cherny feels it lacks the necessary catchiness. He remains open to suggestions and is actively crowdsourcing ideas, inviting readers to share alternative terminology via tech reporters or by tweeting directly at his account (@bcherny).

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