VBLabs is where I learn AI by actually building and running it: assistants, automation, and live dashboards doing real work every day — not demos.
Three things, done thoroughly.
Custom assistants that handle real operations — email, scheduling, monitoring, research, and proactive alerts — integrated with the tools you already use.
Workflows that remove the busywork: data ingestion, reporting, notifications, and integrations between systems that were never meant to talk to each other.
Live operational dashboards and decision-ready reports built from your existing data — inventory, cash flow, infrastructure, whatever runs your business.
Our own operations run on the same platform we build for others — an AI assistant handles our monitoring, reporting, and infrastructure every day.
One documented line from the last twelve months, plus the earlier titles that line grew out of. A title is listed only when a public source dates it. This is not a census of every posting.
The standalone title peaked around 2023. By September 2026 it had largely contracted, and the skill had been absorbed into broader roles such as AI engineer. It stays on this ledger because that contraction is what the last year made obvious.
ODSC, Sep 2026In June 2025 Tobi Lütke preferred “context engineering” to prompt engineering, and Andrej Karpathy amplified it days later: filling the context window with just the right information for the next step. The discipline is still in use. Later titles sit on top of it.
Simon Willison, Jun 2025On 10 March 2026 Vivek Trivedy defined an agent as a model plus a harness: everything that is not the model, including state, tools, and feedback. “Harness engineer” has since been used as a title. Public writing still describes a practice, not a settled job family.
LangChain, Mar 2026Addy Osmani named loop engineering in June 2026: replace yourself as the person who prompts the agent, and design the system that does it instead. As a job-board title it is still thin.
O'Reilly Radar, Jun 2026Prompt engineer peaked around 2023 and, as a standalone title, had largely contracted by September 2026. Context engineering is still the name for filling the window. Harness and loop are 2026 names for the system around the model, not settled job families. Ledger dated 9 Oct 2026.
VBLabs is a personal and professional path to learning AI — from the inside out, and turned into practical, everyday use.