From Vibe Engineering to Continuous AI

Vibe coding emerged earlier this year to describe fast, loose experimentation with AI.

Now, Simon Willison has proposed "vibe engineering":

Vibe engineering does a good job of distinguishing "the different, harder, and more sophisticated way of working with AI tools to build production software" from vibe coding.

However, it doesn't capture the teams and organizations creating workflows where AI operates continuously across their entire development lifecycle. This is where Continuous AI comes in.

Engineering organizations scaling vibe engineering are practicing Continuous AI. They are vibe engineering Continuous AI workflows.

From brain coding to vibe engineering

This part of the story should feel familiar. Over the last couple, many developers have made the journey from typing curly braces manually to using AI coding agents to write most of their code.

Trust builds gradually. You start by letting AI handle small tasks. As you see it succeed, you give it more autonomy

But something shifts once you trust an agent to run for five minutes without constant supervision.

You get bored waiting. So you spin up a second agent to work on something else in parallel.

As you get better at managing multiple agents, you start pushing the limits. Three tasks running. Four. Five.

From vibe engineering to Continuous AI

But you're not the only developer at your company doing this. Everyone on your team is running agents now. This is where Continuous AI begins to emerge.

Suddenly everyone wants the same things: secure execution, event-driven triggers, overnight runs, monitoring, etc.

And everything becomes hard to manage. Monitoring agents. Reviewing their work. Understanding what's running where.

And then when Continuous AI workflows get off track, developers need to step in. They guide the agent back on course or take over completely.

You need tools that let you seamlessly transition between autonomous agents and hands-on development. Between the IDE and the CLI. Between full automation and human control.

Continuous AI isn't about removing developers from the loop. It's about letting developers work at the right level of abstraction for each task.

Sometimes that's vibe coding—watching AI generate something quickly. Sometimes it's vibe engineering—carefully reviewing every line while AI accelerates the work. And increasingly, it's Continuous AI—orchestrating multiple remote agents while staying accountable for what ships.

To explore Continuous AI more, check out cookbooks on the Continue Docs.