Developer Identity: From Writing to Steering

The shift from "writing" code to managing LLM agents has left a massive void in how we describe our actual jobs. We used to create or build software; now, we're essentially directing a high-speed stream of tokens.

Andrej Karpathy's "vibe coding" captured the initial excitement of 2025, but that term falls apart the moment a project hits a production environment and crashes because the "vibe" didn't account for edge-case memory leaks. For those of us doing professional work, saying "I let an agent write this" sounds less like a workflow and more like an excuse.

The problem is that brand-specific verbs—like "Clauding" or "Clankering"—feel like marketing speak, not engineering. I've tried a few alternatives to describe the daily grind of prompt engineering and agent orchestration, but nothing quite sticks:

• Tokencrafting: Describes the precision of managing context windows, but feels too academic.
• Vibecrafting: A nod to the original term, but still lacks the "engineering" weight.
• Steering: Accurate, but sounds like I'm driving a boat rather than shipping a product.

In a real-world AI workflow, the actual labor has shifted from syntax mastery to architectural oversight and rigorous verification. We aren't typing characters; we are validating intent and debugging the output of a probabilistic engine.

If we aren't "writing" software anymore, the most honest description is probably that we've become editors of machine-generated logic. We spend 10% of our time prompting and 90% of our time ensuring the agent didn't hallucinate a library that doesn't exist. Until the industry settles on a new term, we're stuck in this linguistic limbo between being a "coder" and a "prompt operator."