Claude Code chief Boris Cherny is one of the tech industry’s foremost AI-code evangelists. But the popular term that now defines this type of tool — “vibe coding” — is beginning to annoy him.
Cherny, the creator of Anthropic’s juggernaut coding product, told Business Insider on Wednesday that he’s begun a search for alternatives.
“Vibe coding” was coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, and quickly became a catch-all for the new paradigm of writing code with help from AI tools and agents.
The Collins Online Dictionary named “vibe coding” its word of the year in November. But Cherny, who’s said that Claude Code has “solved” coding for him, thinks it’s time for something new. His product and OpenAI’s Codex alternative are raking in billions of revenue for their respective firms and churning out millions of lines of useful code — “vibe,” in those terms, is a bit glib.
Cherny has asked Anthropic’s Claude chatbot for ideas. It spit out “agentic engineering,” another Karpathy phrase, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring. Anthropic’s current documentation calls Claude Code an “AI-powered coding assistant” and an “agentic coding tool.” OpenAI calls Codex a “coding agent that helps you build and ship with AI.”
The Claude Code chief is looking for input. He suggested that Business Insider readers could route their “vibe coding” replacement suggestions through these reporters, or just tweet their ideas at him. (@bcherny). If it’s good, he’ll use it.
Cherny also spoke during Anthropic’s morning keynote for its Code with Claude conference, where the company announced that it was adding new compute capacity through a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
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