Forget Vibe Coders: ‘Cracked Engineers’ Are All the Rage in Tech

In November, a young robotics startup called Gradient began interviewing applicants for an engineering internship at the Palo Alto, Calif.–based company. But after talking to a half-dozen of them, the startup decided to ditch its plan to add interns.

Why exactly? “Not worth our time,” said J.X. Mo, 23, Gradient’s co-founder. While some of the applicants had seemed promising, “none of them would be cracked enough for us to hire them,” he said.

These days, plenty of people within tech are after the same thing Mo is: a “cracked engineer,” a buzzphrase that describes an idealized version of a software engineer capable of thriving in the AI era through scrappiness, workaholism and technical savvy.