Claude Code Is Causing the Great Productivity Panic of 2026

“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.

Far from freeing up engineers for a life of leisure, increasingly capable AI coding agents—including Anthropic PBC’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex—have over the past few months created a kind of ...