Glossary

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Agentic Engineering

‍Agentic engineering describes AI-assisted development where you mostly instruct autonomous AI agents rather than writing code by hand. It is emerging as the more disciplined successor term to vibe coding. Andrej Karpathy proposed the term to describe work where “you are not writing the code directly 99 percent of the time”, and instead act as director and reviewer for AI agents that plan, write, and test on their own.

How Thunkable fits in with agentic engineering

Thunkable’s AI Builder sits closer to agentic engineering than casual vibe coding once you factor in Discuss Mode, live device testing, and the ability to use the code editor for more precise control. You describe the goal, review what the AI produces, and do course corrections, which is the same oversight loop agentic engineering describes, applied to real native app development instead of a browser prototype.

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AI App Builder

An AI app builder is a platform that generates a working mobile or web app from a natural language description instead of requiring manual coding or manual drag-and-drop assembly. The category includes tools that produce web prototypes as well as tools that produce real, app store-ready native apps. This difference matters: A prompt that outputs a web page is a much different product than a prompt that outputs a publishable app store app. Do not be fooled by marketing language on this; going from prompt to true native apps that are ready for app store publishing cuts out a lot of time, effort, and resources for Thunkable creators.

What to look for in an AI app builder

Again, check for whether the output is a true, native app build or a web app wrapped to look like one (see: PWA). Native apps get full access to device hardware like the camera, GPS, and bluetooth, as they pass App Store review more reliably. Thunkable’s AI Builder generates native iOS and Android apps directly from your prompt, no wrappers involved.

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AI Code Generation

AI code generation is the process of an AI model writing usable source code in response to a prompt or written description. It is the underlying technology that powers AI app builders. Some tools stop at generating code you have to assemble yourself. Others, like Thunkable’s AI Builder, generate the code and assemble it into a running, testable app in the same step.

AI Pair Programmer

An AI pair programmer is an AI assistant that works alongside you during development, suggesting code, catching errors, and implementing changes as you go. The term comes from “pair programming”, where two human developers work at one workstation.

Tools like Cursor and Claude Code act as an AI pair programmer for traditional coders. Thunkable’s AI Builder plays a similar role for no-code creators: It writes, tests, and adjusts your app’s logic in response to your direction, without requiring you to know how to code in the first place.

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