Steve Yegge's Vibe Coding Manifesto: Why Claude Code Isn't It & What Comes After the IDE

0:03We are here, live at AI Engineer Summit with Steve Yeggi, the legendary Steve Yeggi of Steve's Tech Talks, Steve's Platforms, and most recently Source Graphs and AMP. Welcome. And most recently, Vibe Coding. Yeah, that's right. The Vibe Coding book. So this is the big Vibe Coding discussion. In the pre-chat, we were discussing the intersection of Vibe Coding and AI engineering. So we got the kind of movement leaders of both sides here. How do you see it? It's absolutely a movement, right? You got to get people behind it. I said at the end of my talk today that there's a huge backlash, and the backlash is only just brewing now.

0:38So you and I are pushing forward on these waves of AI engineering is about building AI-enabled applications and being in AI. And Vibe Coding is about abandoning the old ways of producing software and embracing the new ways. And both of these are making people pretty mad. I think they're mad if their identity is tied to the way that they work today with no changes, no room for changes. Yeah. So I'll start with my first hot take. Okay. Let's go. There is a demographic that is the most affected by that. Their identity is the most tied up with the way that they work. Okay. It's not junior engineers.

1:21It's not non-engineers. They're all vibe coding. it's senior engineers, senior leaders, people who have, so basically you can, you can narrow it down to 12 to 15 years of experience. They hate vibe coding and they hate AI and they're online going, my 15 years is better than that AI. Okay. Now you saw, I don't know if you saw Jordan Hubbard's post from Nvidia where he just laid out some really nice advice on how to get the most out of agents as you're coding. And this guy posted and he's like, yeah, you know, no, you, you stick with your doing your director stuff and leave the programming to programmers, right?

1:58When you have 15 years of experience like me, then you're qualified to talk, right? Right. So I said something to him, like, I think you need to learn to read a clock. And he's like, and until you have 15 years of experience, and I'm like, well, you got more experience than him, or I have 45. So Should I go to 60 before I can talk to you? Or should I cut out 30 years of experience so I can be as dumb as you? Those are my options. So I don't know. I guess I'll see them in 15 years. Okay, I think there's one element that I'm trying to figure out of, while these people have to coexist, right? And most companies are going to have a mix.

2:34Even OpenAI, by the way, we talked about this last night at dinner. Guys, OpenAI has people who don't use AI to code. They have people who don't use codecs. they probably are using Cursor or something. Okay. But they're not using the agentic loops, right? Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, it's, so, you know, we talked to, you know, Andrew Glover there, you know, the director of DevProd, and from what he was saying, they've been planning on going public with this once they have more data about it. Yeah. Anecdotally, they're sharing that... The performance. The performance difference is like 10x by any way that you measure it.

3:08So lines of code, commits, business impact, whatever. and it's so stark and pronounced that the people who aren't adopting it are now 10 times less productive at performance review time. Two people, same title, same job, and all of a sudden one of them is 10 times as productive than the other one. What do you do? And the answer is you panic. You actually go to HR and you go to legal and you're like, what are our options here? Because the time is coming, okay? Here's another hot take, all right? If you're still using an IDE to develop code by January 1st, you're a bad engineer. There's a hot take for you, right?

3:46Now, you still have, what, five, six weeks to still be an okay engineer while you're using your IDE, but this is the time that you need to drop it and learn how agents code, okay? Because it's a skill set. I mean, it's so complicated. We wrote this book about it, me and Gene Kim, because we were playing with it ourselves last year and blogging about it and talking about it. And every blog post was 30 pages. And it's like, what are you gonna do with a 30-page blog post? That's long even for me, right? Yeah. And at some point, I was just, man, like the skills that you got to learn in order to get the AI to do the things that everyone's mad because it's doing them, right?

4:19Because everybody's like, well, I tried it. I spent two hours with it and all it produced was garbage. And the answer is actually you have to spend 200 hours with it. You have to spend 2 ,000 hours with it. And that's not actually an exaggeration. Gene just pulled up a study that showed that you actually have to spend a year or 2 ,000 hours with AI before you trust it. And what does trust mean? Trust in this case specifically means before you as a user can predict what it's going to do. And if it's unpredictable, of course, you're going to be mad. But as soon as you've worked with it for a full year to where you fully understand its capabilities and its drawbacks, which haven't really fundamentally changed, it's gotten more capable, but the edges are always the same.

4:59It hallucinates, it gets lost, it gets amnesia, dementia, it lies to you, whatever, right? Those skills, we've been building them for years now. Everybody who's been trying to write code with AI. We've been trying. It hasn't really worked, but it's been working better and better and better and better. And now it's reached the point where it's working a lot better than all of the other options. Yeah. And if you haven't tried it in two months, you're way out of date. The models are much better than two months ago. If you haven't tried it in a year, you're a dinosaur. It's just unbelievable how bad you are.

5:27And, you know, you may be, look, I have friends who are much better engineers than I am. Okay, I mean, world-class, maybe some of the best in the whole world, okay, have built technologies that you've heard of, and they're not using AI yet, except the occasional I'll ask Cursor a chat question like Wikipedia, whatever, okay? Those people are going to be the interns in a year. You really think so? Yeah. With all their experience that they have? So, I've had this hypothesis that has not been really confirmed with any anecdotal evidence at all until today, when I met somebody at your conference that told me about how he had been in this position, 12 years of experience, didn't want anything to do with AI.

6:07And he met these two PhD students from somewhere in Europe, I forget where. And they were both just super hardcore vibe coders, you know, with the agents, right? And he was watching them work, and they were super junior, and they kind of didn't know what they were doing, but they just had no fear and all the ambition. And all they did was they just kept hammering on the thing going, okay, well, why did you do it that way? Explain it to me. Okay, well, let's look at other options. And they would just be kind of the perfect engineer with no context. The perfect no context engineer, what questions are they going to ask?

6:38Have you thought about scaling? Have you thought about security? How is your test coverage, right? I mean, engineers are going to all ask the same questions, right? And he realized that engineer in a box is not too far off from knowing the right questions to ask an LLM. And that these two students were so productive with it, he was blown away that he was like, oh no. Like that's when the light bulb went on. He said, I have to learn this. And now he's been doing it ever since, right? But it ain't easy. You're not going to pick up Claude Code and you're not going to just try it and be like, it's just going to work.

7:06It might. You might get lucky. But eventually, if you don't have the right mindset, if you don't have the right attitude going in. Now, even with the right attitude, how often have you sworn at your agents in the last two days? With the actual F word or like, right? I'm pretty polite. I say thank you and please. I say thank you and please. And then, why the fuck did you do that? Right? And it's because Gene and I realized this after we published the book. You had this helper. They're very human-like. They come in, you have to tell them a lot of stuff, and they need a lot of guidance. But over time, they need less guidance.

7:37Your prompts get shorter. Things get streamlined. They seem to get it. They're working. Now, if this were a human being, you would draw the conclusion it's because they understand you and they get you and they're finally part of the freaking team. Do not make that mistake with LLMs. Never make the mistake of anthropomorphizing an LLM like Larry Ellison, right? The LLM, at any moment, can stab you in the back, okay? It can just be like, yeah, we took care of that really hard problem. Now I'm going to delete your database. And you're just like, no, right? And it's because of that. We call it the hot hand.

8:10You're like, it's going, man. I'm feeling good. This thing gets me. I'm going to make it do a production change. And that's how I found out about this. And I was like, my script can't access prod. And so it chose to do it in the worst imaginable way. What it did was lock out the entire rest of the universe, including my live game and everything else, and only allowed my script to access prot. And it was changing password. It changed the password. And I was like, why did you change my password? Right? Yeah. And it's like, oh, I'm so sorry. I definitely shouldn't have done that. What? No shit. Okay.

8:41And I'm just like, oh, right. This is what will happen to you if you just, you just try to do agentic coding. Okay. Bad things will happen. This is what our book is about really, right? Well, I mean, that's not the best ad because then what? Like you learn and then eventually you learn how the speed bumps and the corners and everything. It's like driving, right? It's like driving. Like you, you, you're, you want to become like a NASCAR driver. Like this is high performance stuff. You're coding with 12 agents at a time and you're, you're more ambitious than you've ever been. I was talking to a guy today who's got, got way more projects going than I've got.

9:14I don't know where he gets all the time from, but he's probably doing 10 or 12, like major projects at the same time right now. And he's just doing it all with with the gent of coding you know so i mean like man the the the ad here is that you will turn into batman but you can't just grab the suit and put it on and be like i'm batman you're just a cosplayer you're cosplaying at vibe coding you got to learn how the tool belt works and that's going to be pain suffering and mistakes and learnings now you can get a lot of it by reading this and all of the other vibe coding books read the o'reilly watch the talk i mean seriously like you should like get all of the possible angles at it because it seems to land differently for different people.

9:54There'll be some analogy where you finally get it. And I get it. It's like this and it's like a 3D printer and nobody else thought it was like a 3D printer, but somehow that was the magic that made it for you. Right. Yeah. I would say one of the biggest surprises from the dinner yesterday was how many people all have the experience where they no longer write single lines of code. Like they're really just kind of prompting and doing quite good by that. Single lines of code? You mean they never write any code at all? They might edit. But like, I think when they're writing net new, they'll always start with the prompts.

10:24No editing. No touch. No editing. It is very expensive when you're like, that identifier is misspelled and it's a local, you know. You could just edit it, but it's better for you to close your IDE and probably uninstall it. No, actually, that's not true. Somebody finally convinced me that IDEs are fantastic. IntelliJ in particular, keep it open. It's a Gradle build. And actually not for the LSP, although you can use it for that. Actually, that's another good way to use the LLM if you get an MCP server. But no, it's that IntelliJ's auto-indexing is so much faster. And incremental rebuild is so much faster than Gradle.

10:57This is the guy from last night, yeah. Yeah. So all you do is leave IntelliJ running. But you shouldn't look in it. It's a tool for the AI now, right? Amazing. One other thing that is a big part of some of the hot things you're saying You say CloudCode is not it. CloudCode ain't it. Explain yourself. All right. Everyone here loves CloudCode. Everyone here loves CloudCode or AMP if you use our product, which is just recently leapfrogged CloudCode again because of Gemini 3. AMP has this cool feature where it goes to another model. Just to pre-warm you, I also want to talk about just Google in general and how this Gemini revolution has kind of changed Google's image.

11:33But let's talk about CloudCode. Sure. CloudCode's been around since March. cloud code has been proven to work and so but yet probably 80 of the world's 90 of the world's programmers are not using it or anything like it you get certain companies where it's really taken off you know but uh but most aren't the world is stuck on cursor the word world is stuck in 2024 last year we were trying to get people to write with chat right and we were like we're telling And they were like, no, completions. And we were like, oh, God, no, but it can generate the code. And you just got to paste it in. And you just got to do all this stuff.

12:09And they were like, that sounds kind of hard. And we're like, but it's faster. And they wouldn't do it. And then nine months later, it finally percolated in. And now they're all like, I like cursor. And it's like, that's so last year, dude. Right? Like, wake up. And yet they haven't adopted it. And so you have to, at this point, look at it and say, why haven't they adopted it? Let's go look at the reasons. And the answer is, it's too hard. It's too hard. You have to be able to read. Man, most engineers, honestly, like to them, five paragraphs is an essay. Okay? And with Cloud Code, you've got to read waterfalls of not just information, but also code and diffs, right?

12:44Because if you're going to put your IDE away, you actually do have to look at the diffs. Now, I'm going to tell you that once you get some expertise at this, you can actually tell from the shape of the diffs and the color of the diffs and the length of the diffs. The vibe. You can tell whether it needs a code review, whether they're doing the wrong thing, whether that they seem to be writing suspiciously too much code for this problem, right? The diffs alone, just the shape of the diffs can tell you a lot about what's going on without actually reading the code, but you should pay attention to them.

13:07Otherwise you'll have problems that will only crop up later, right? But yeah, I mean like put the IDE away. Okay, clog code and then get clog code out and try to start using it, all right? And you're going to find that it's, look, I've been using clog code, honestly, 10 to 12 hours a day, literally, for months and months and months and I still curse it out all the time. I just lose my mind. I'm like, how could you have done that when you just said, right? And it's like, it's actually been shown, it's starting to be shown that sometimes when you put a little pressure on them, they perform better.

13:40You can break through law jams that way. But anyway, look, you're gonna run into problems. But the thing is, next year, the tools will be better. Okay? If Cloud Code's not it, what is it? Well, we gotta get back to something like an IDE, right? I mean, that's just gonna be, it's gotta be natural for people. You gotta be able to look at it and see what's going on, not have to read. It's got to have visual indicators, right? And yet it's not going to be an IDE because an IDE is very much focused on helping you write code and that's not what you do anymore, right? So what it's going to be is it's going to be your agent orchestration dashboard.

14:11You're going to walk in in the morning and be like, yo, so how's it going? It's like, oh, that one's still running. That one's running a tool. That one needs my input. Okay, right? You just go through the list. And so I'm building one. You can go look. It's supposed to be a private repo, but it's public. So I've got forks and shit. happens. But whatever, you can play with it. It's called VC, Vibe Coder. It's my V2 of the Vibe Coder system. And what it does is it creates a set of scanned workflows that run the agents for you. Yeah. I don't know if you saw Antigravity from Google the other day. We shot two days ago.

14:43It's so fun how much stuff people are inventing that are all around periphery. So look, I called this, I don't know, I called it in March. With Revenge of the Junior Developer, I did that chart and everything, and like, Dario quotes it in all his custom advisory boards and everything. Right. Really? Yeah. Yeah. No, it was it was really pretty impactful. And I called that. What's going to happen is the that agents I even back in March, I knew they were too hard. I was like, what's going to happen is they're you can run them programmatically. And 90 percent of the crap that you do with them could be handled by a model, often a cheaper model.

15:13Right. If it's just like if it's asking you, which of these two things should I do next? They're equally important. Like just have haiku say either one. Right. So like I called the orchestrators are coming and it's taken close until like the end of the year to get there, which is roughly where I predicted them coming. Replit, Agent 3, there's a bunch. There's Conductor, there's DMAD came out open source. They're all different takes on it, right? But there will be more coming. I guess Google's as well, right? Yes. I like this analogy that they have. It's still pretty new, so who knows what the eventual vision is.

15:47It's that you just get notifications from your agents as they're working. Exactly, yeah. So in mine, in VC, there's an activity feed. That was one of the first features I added, which is like, I want to go work, and I just want to get notifications periodically of interesting stuff. I wonder if they'll have social networks of agents. Well, so the agent - They're like, together with each other, following each other. Well, so I just had three-hour coffee with Jeffrey Emanuel, who did the MCP agent mail. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. He's the one that wrote the article that crashed the stock market about NVIDIA.

16:19That Jeffrey Emanuel. An incredibly well-written article that said, this is why it's a bubble. And the whole market went, and Karpathy started following it. It's back up. He wrote what you just said. He said, it is back up. But he wrote agent mail, which is, he was just tired of having to copy stuff between his agents. Like, you tell me what to tell this agent. And so he made a little, like, I don't know, HTTP server that's like an inbox for them, a messaging. And they talk to each other now. Now he goes, coordinate amongst yourselves to parallelize this task, this epic that I just put together or whatever, and they'll do it.

16:51Some people are coming at it top down and trying to build orchestrators that do it all for you. But interestingly, with Beads, which is the issue tracker session thing that I made, plus his... Purely vibe-coded, by the way. Purely vibe-coded, yes. So, I mean, I get PRs every day for horrible problems that I introduced, but nobody seems to mind because we've got stable versions now. So VEEDS is like living proof that you never actually have to look at the code as long as you and other people are asking the right questions and having the AI look at the code. I get PRs from people all the time where it's obvious that the AI did all of the analysis and all of the coding.

17:23And I look at it and sometimes I'll just be like, so my AI, what do you think of their AI's PR, right? It's all summarization. I mean, isn't that bad? It's bad if your code, look, it's all about the outcome. VEEDS is working and it's got tens of thousands of very happy people using it. So obviously it's not bad. I met one of the superfans down there. If you do this to your company's production website and bring it down, then yeah, it's bad. But still, Beads is kind of a database, you know? And database is one of the harder things to make. You know, Beads is really weird. The architecture is really weird.

17:55And the only reason it works is because it wouldn't have worked in the old days. It would have been just too hard to manage and not programmatically. But what you do is you tell the AI, go fix it all up. Whenever it's corrupted or there's a merge conflict, just fix it. And it's funny because Jeffrey Emanuel, who did the mail, basically did the same thing. He has all his agents run in the same directory and they do file reservations. They're like, I need that file. Man, I used to do that Accenture in the 90s, right? I'd like run over to a dude's cubicle and be like, I need that file. Their revision control was so bad.

18:23So like he's got a file reservation system going. But what happened was as soon as he put it in place, his agents just started working. And now he's got this little village of agents, right? And that's where we're headed. So the orchestrators are going to be about not keeping the agent on the rails, but keeping all of your agents on the rails and communicating with each other. Yeah. And then you hit the wall. Boom. Does anybody know what the wall is? Once you get past all this, merge. Merging is the, it's the wall that everyone is hitting right now. Yeah. I think the company that's best poised to solve it is Grappite.

19:00I was going to go talk to him about it. They'd be happy to talk to you. Yeah. Yeah. I think everybody needs to solve it. And if you're at an enterprise, like what we hear, because Gene Kim and I talk, we talk to companies all that. I'm a SaaS seller, so we get to hear the inside story from all these big companies, right? And they're saying, yeah, as soon as you get to the point where like every developer is 10 times as productive, merging their code becomes this incredibly complicated problem. Because you and I work at the same time for two or three hours. We make, you know, 30 ,000 line change each.

19:33Mine makes it in first, and it gets merged. And then you come along, and I have literally changed our logging system and our architecture here and APIs that you were using. Yeah. And so it's not going to be a simple, it's not a simple, let's fix the merge conflicts. It's like, you're going to have to re-envision and re-imagine and re-implement your change on my change. Or rip yours out. Or rip mine out and make me do it. But ultimately, ours are just the AIs doing it, right? But the important thing is that they have to be serialized. It is a queue. And when they go in there, they have to actually basically redo what they were doing on top of the new thing.

20:10Nobody has solved this, and it is a huge obstacle right now. You know what one company did? Sorry, last thing. One company said, here's our solution. One engineer per repo. Not making that up. It's a solution. It's a solution for now. The classic solution for this is stack diffs, right? Merge queues, stack diffs. I don't know about stack diffs, so I guess I'm dumb. It's like a Facebook concept that they're trying to bring to the wider world. GitHub is working on adding it. I just talked to Jared Palmer there. Basically, I'm hearing no solution yet, but you should be aware of it and design around it.

20:41Yeah, I mean, there's the old-fashioned way of just hammering through it really hard. Well, also, you know, you could just talk to the other guy and say, like, hey, I'm doing this, you know, pretty deep architectural change. Let me go first. And let's agree on the overall pattern first. So, yeah, I mean, I've run into this situation a few times where I've actually tried to give this agent a heads up that this one's making a change that affects this one. Yeah. With the mail thing that Jeffrey did, I think once I get it wired up, because he doesn't use work trees and I'm going to, this. But once they can actually talk to each other, I think it's going to be as simple as just keep in mind that that agent's working on something that affects you.

21:13You might want to go talk to them about it. Yeah, and agree on an overall, like, fundamental infra. And they're quite good at it. They just do it. It's because they have no ego. They're not like, oh, it's got to be me. Right. So just whoever's first gets to be the leader. Great. What do you and him disagree on? Me and who? Jeffrey. Emmanuel, the guy that I just met. Well, so we foundationally, fundamentally disagree that having 12 agents work in a single repo clone is a good idea. So you're on the pro side. I'm on the pro, like either get work trees with lots of branches or separate repo clones.

21:47I would imagine. Keep them sandboxed. He's in favor. They've got them all in the same, they're literally, they're using the same Git, the same build. So one of them will be like doing a build, like need to run a test. That's so much churn. Yeah, but he has a file reservation system. So the funny thing is, okay, I was like, this is insanity. And he's talking me into at least acknowledging that it probably works pretty well if you're a solo dev and you're using no more than a dozen or 20 agents. Because it is actually working for him. And he uses the same principle that Beads does, which is it wouldn't have worked in the old days.